Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili on Friday pardoned two Israeli businessmen jailed in the ex-Soviet state for trying to bribe a senior official over a multi-million compensation case.
Ron Fuchs and Zeev Frenkiel were convicted in April after a high-profile case during which they claimed they had been entrapped by the Georgian government in an attempt to stop their compensation claim, although the authorities strongly denied this.
"On the Israeli government's and the Israeli president's personal request, on humanitarian grounds and taking into account the health condition of Mr.Fuchs and Mr. Frenkiel, the President of Georgia has taken the decision to pardon them," Saakashvili's spokeswoman Manana Manjgaladze told AFP.
Fuchs and Frenkiel were convicted of seeking to bribe Georgia's deputy finance minister to drop an appeal against an international arbitration ruling which awarded $98.1 million (72.8 million euros) to Fuchs and another businessman, Greek national Ioannis Kardassopoulos.
Fuchs was sentenced to seven years in prison and Frenkiel was jailed for six and a half years.
Georgian media reported in September that Frenkiel had a heart attack while in prison, while the Israeli embassy in Tbilisi complained that the businessmen had been mistreated in jail.
Fuchs and his Greek partner Kardassopoulos were given the compensation award by a World Bank arm for investor-state dispute arbitration after Georgia terminated an agreement made during the chaotic post-Soviet period in the early 1990s for their company to develop energy projects.
The Georgian government also announced Friday that it had struck a deal with the men's company to end the arbitration dispute, and that it had agreed to pay out $37 million (27.4 million euros) in compensation.
"The government of Georgia has done everything to avoid heavy financial sanctions which resulted from the previous administration's illegal actions and the corruption that then existed in the country," the justice ministry said in a statement.
Georgia has been praised for cutting official corruption since Saakashvili came to office in 2004, but critics allege that the country still has problems with judicial independence.