He said this proved the trial was politically motivated, an allegation denied by the prosecution.

Janša, who is due to start serving his two-year prison sentence for bribery on Friday unless the Supreme Court intervenes, told the press it had been brought to the attention of the defence that the Finnish case file contains 7,000 documents that are not included in the file in Slovenia.

He said that a lot of the Finnish material was related to Slovenia and added that the criminal procedure act demands that incriminating as well as exonerating evidence is included in the case file.

Given that the Slovenian prosecution had two years to examine the Finnish case file "negligence is ruled out", the former prime minister said, adding that this instead proved that "this was a show trial from the very start".

"We did not experience something like this even when facing the military tribunal in 1988," he said in a reference to the military trial in which he was convicted by Yugoslav authorities for releasing military secrets, a watershed in Slovenia's independence efforts.

He explained that the defence had not examined the other case files sooner because it was convinced that the bill of indictment as presented could in no way stand.

Janša and his lawyers said that they were not yet able to go through the Finnish documents in detail but that already a quick scan showed that some of those pertaining to Slovenia were missing.

Janša highlighted for instance an e-mail between Patria officials sent around three weeks before the period in which he was supposed to have accepted the promise of a reward.

The email says that Janša's alleged aide Tone Krkovič, who has also been convicted, had no powers to represent the buyer. This showed, according to Janša, that Patria had detailed information about Krkovič's role which was not the role ascribed to him by the prosecution and court.

The same e-mail, missing in the Slovenian case file, mentions that one of Patria's owners EADS, had been promoting a different partner for Patria than Rotis. Janša said that the prosecution had claimed that Rotis had already been picked beforehand and that Janša's reward had been connected to this.

Janša's lawyer Franci Matoz explained that the appeal to the Supreme Court would be supplemented with the new findings.

Meanwhile, Supreme State Prosecutor Andrej Ferlinc denied having rigged or hand-picked evidence in the case in any way, Radio Slovenija reported.

"At the main hearing...as well as during the second instance procedure every smallest document that is in the case file was discussed," Ferlinc said, adding that the Slovenian prosecution had even forwarded to the Finnish prosecutor additional documents that were then used in the appeal procedure in Finland.

Branka Zobec Hrastar, who initially handled the case before leaving the prosecution ranks a month before the trial started in September 2010, also denied any rigging of the case filed in a statement for the STA.

Zobec Hrastar said that she included everything obtained from Finnish authorities, including exonerating evidence, adding that there was no need to rig the documentation since the evidence spoke for itself.

She also said that she had closed cases against some of the suspects in the Patria case when it became clear that there was insufficient evidence, but that has been forgotten.

The Supreme State Prosecution Service also rejected that there had been wrongdoing by the prosecutors in the case, saying that the work performed was "professional and done in accordance with the law".

"This is just another attempt at politicking and discrediting the prosecution service, something we have been witnessing for some time," it said.