"When Fatou Bensouda traveled to New York for the United Nations General Assembly in September, all appeared right with her world...Just a few days later, she found herself surrounded by controversy. A series of articles in DER SPIEGEL and other European media partnered with European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) had shed light on some uncomfortable truths. Luis Moreno Ocampo, Bensouda's predecessor in The Hague, had owned offshore companies in Caribbean tax havens, allowed himself to be exploited by the West in the 2011 Libyan conflict and, at the end of his term with the ICC, signed up to some highly dubious advisory roles with clients that included a Libyan oil billionaire who used to be close to the Gadhafi regime. Finally, it was alleged that two members of Bensouda's staff had been secretly working with Ocampo, one of them supplying him with insider information from the ICC...
Fatou Bensouda did her best to distance herself from the Ocampo affair and initiated an investigation into the activities of the two staff members of her team. Her office also released a statement claiming that she had avoided contact with Ocampo since assuming office...
Her vehement disavowal, though, could now cause her problems. Internal documents leaked to French investigative platform Mediapart and examined by DER SPIEGEL paint a very different picture. They suggest that in fact Bensouda had a very close, trusting working relationship with her predecessor, writing to him on one occasion that he could contact her at 'any time' and, on another, that she was 'very grateful' for his help. During the ICC's investigation into crimes against humanity and war crimes in Colombia, she even sent confidential documents to Ocampo, who was active in the country as a consultant. A comparison of Bensouda's official statements and her email exchanges with Ocampo lead to the inevitable conclusion that the ICC's chief prosecutor has repeatedly not told the truth...
The documents in DER SPIEGEL's possession indicate that the ICC's chief prosecutor sought the advice of her predecessor on several occasions and perhaps allowed herself to be influenced by him... It now seems that she too has been enveloped by the Ocampo affair."