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 Jackie Selebi, 60, was convicted in July after a nation beset by crime heard months of testimony about its top cop going on designer shopping sprees with a convicted drug smuggler.
The case against Selebi, a one-time president of Interpol, has been a chief exhibit in a national debate over whether corruption and political meddling are undermining the fight against crime.
The court freed Selebi on bail Tuesday to file an appeal, and his lawyers said they would do so.
Selebi, once an important official in the governing African National Congress party, had pleaded innocent. He claimed evidence was fabricated for the charge he accepted money and gifts in exchange for meeting a drug smuggler's business associates and tipping him off to investigations into his crimes.
Selebi argued he was targeted by enemies who wanted to punish him for his criticism of an elite crime-fighting unit. The unit was disbanded in 2008 after it tried to prosecute Jacob Zuma on corruption charges before he went on to become South Africa's president.
Judge Meyer Joffe, in delivering the verdict last month, said Selebi's conspiracy theory had no basis, and that the former police chief showed "complete contempt for the truth" during the trial.
Selebi was a former schoolteacher who in his youth was twice detained without trial for his anti-apartheid activism. He went into exile in Tanzania and later the Soviet Union, where he underwent military training. After apartheid ended in 1994, he was a member of the first all-race parliament, and later served as the envoy to the U.N. in Geneva.
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