CELJE, Slovenia (Reuters) - A Slovenian court on Friday brought the first-instance ruling to acquit Janez Jansa, a three-time prime minister and the key opposition figure in the Alpine country, and two alleged accomplices on charges of abuse of office and corruption.
Jansa, the president of the largest opposition Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), had dismissed the indictment as an attempt to remove him from politics ahead of a general election due in 2026.
"Despite the fact that it was a clear and visible farce from the very beginning, the prosecutor requested two years in prison," Jansa told his cheering supporters after leaving the court. "This victory today is in quotation marks, our fight here is not over."
Hundreds of his supporters gathered outside the court in the eastern town of Celje, waving Slovenian flags and carrying banners accusing the judiciary of being corrupt and biased.
Jansa, a 66-year-old right-wing populist, was indicted on charges of abuse of office in a property sale in 2005, when he was serving his first term as prime minister.
The case also involved the directors of two companies who were involved in a series of transactions related to the sale of a plot of land owned by Jansa in an alleged exchange for the purchase of an apartment for him in the capital Ljubljana.
Jansa, who championed Slovenia's bid for independence from the then Yugoslavia in 1991 and served three times as Slovenia's prime minister, was sentenced to two years in jail in 2013 for bribery in a 2006 deal with Finnish defence group Patria while serving his second term as premier.
He had denied all charges.
(Reporting by Borut Zivulovic, writing by Daria Sito-Sucic; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)
