Nahum Manbar, an Israeli businessman convicted last month of treason for selling $16 million worth of poison gas materials to Iran, will today be sentenced in a Tel Aviv courtroom. This will follow the failure of one of the most desperate and controversial attempts in Israeli legal history by a defence lawyer to save his client.
In a dramatic, last ditch attempt to spare Mr Manbar what is certain to be a lengthy jail term, his lawyer, Mr Amnon Zichroni, yesterday petitioned the judge overseeing the case, Mr Amnon Straschnov, to step down - and listed of series of appalling allegations against him.
Among them is the suggestion that Judge Straschnov was pressured into convicting Mr Manbar by Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu - a claim that, if proven, would suggest unlawful intervention by the Prime Minister in the judicial process.
Mr Zichroni also claims that the judge maintained a sexual relationship with a 26-year-old female lawyer on the defence team, and that the couple unlawfully discussed the Manbar case. He claimed that, according to a former boyfriend of the woman, the judge had written her love notes in the courtroom during the trial and invited her on a trip to the United States.
The same woman, Ms Pninat Yanai, it is being claimed, also had a close friendship with Mr Netanyahu's spokesman, Mr Shai Bazak, who allegedly told her six months ago that Mr Manbar would be convicted.
Mr Zichroni's allegations, if true, are devastating for Mr Netanyahu, for Judge Straschnov, and for the standing of the Israeli legal system. Not surprisingly, therefore, they have been seized upon by opposition politicians.
It was an opposition Labour Party Knesset member, indeed, who earlier this week used parliamentary privilege to circumvent a court order barring publication of details of the allegations.
Devastating they may be. However, there is at present no convincing reason to believe they are accurate. Critically, although Mr Netanyahu has attracted censure from the legal community for publicly calling for a harsh sentence for Mr Manbar, there is no hard evidence that he ever intervened in the case. And the denials have been rolling in from all directions.
The Prime Minister has denied any unlawful contact with Judge Straschnov. The judge yesterday said he had had no contact with Mr Netanyahu since before the trial began. Mr Bazak denied discussing the case with Ms Yanai. The judge denied having an illicit relationship with Ms Yanai.
And Ms Yanai herself, having been fired by Mr Zichroni, has now turned on him, calling his list of accusations despicable and erroneous. She had no "romantic or intimate" relationship with the judge, never discussed the case with him, she says, and never discussed it either with Mr Bazak.
After listening to Mr Zichroni yesterday, Judge Straschnov conferred privately with two judicial colleagues, and then returned to the court room to state that he was not standing down. Perhaps recognising that his lawyer's tactics have hardly raised the judge's sympathy for him, Mr Manbar then got up to issue an emotional plea for leniency. Barring further unexpected developments, sentence will be handed down today. - (Additional reporting AFP)