Christian Wulff, former German president, was on Thursday acquitted at a court in Hanover two years after he resigned in the face of corruption allegations.
Mr Wulff, 54, was charged with accepting bribes while in office.
According to the state prosecutor he allowed a film producer to pay a bill of just over €700 for his hotel, food and childcare costs during a visit to the Oktoberfest in Munich in 2008.
Mr Wulff, who was prime minister of Lower Saxony at the time, two months later approached Siemens, the Germany engineering and electronics company, to seek support for the distribution of one of the producer's films, prosecutors said. Both Mr Wulff and the film producer denied corruption.
At the regional court in Hanover, presiding judge Frank Rosenow said the business relationship between the politician and the film producer had developed into a friendship.
The men had counselled each other in times of crisis and acquired the habit of alternately picking up the bill in restaurants, the court heard.
The criminal inquiry was a scandal without precedent in Germany, where the head of state is regarded as the voice of the country's conscience.
The affair began over a report in the tabloid newspaper Bild that Mr Wulff had accepted a €500,000 loan from a businessman's wife.
It turned into a row over press freedom when Bild claimed he threatened to declare "war" if the newspaper published the story.
Mr Wulff quit the office of president in February 2012 after prosecutors demanded his immunity be lifted.
The inquiry broadened out to take in other allegations. The former president's personal life and that of his wife, Bettina, came under intense scrutiny, but prosecutors found little evidence to support accusations against him.
The Munich hotel bill claim was the last outstanding allegation.
Though he has been acquitted, Mr Wulff has paid a high personal price for the scandal. Once seen as a rising star - he was Germany's youngest president at the age of 51 - his political career has been destroyed and his marriage ended in divorce.
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