Karabakh separatists ask for sofa-spud Argentine lawyer’s help Retired “offshore kingpin” jurist puts Azerbaijan on target

Armenians, these days, are busy with the reincarnation of a retired Argentine lawyer in a hope to turn the tide after consecutive failures in discrediting Azerbaijan for the ongoing situation in the latter’s Karabakh region.

Louis Moreno Ocampo, a 71-year-old jurisconsult, announced that he would produce a kind of report about the alleged “genocidal acts” by Azerbaijan against the Armenian minority in Karabakh. The sudden revival of the sofa-spud lawyer came following a request from Arayik Harutunyan, a criminal separatist leader in the Azerbaijani territories, whom the Argentinian jurist calls a “president”.

According to Ocampo’s recent X (former Twitter) tweets, he is going to portray the so-called “blockade” at the Lachin road as a “new genocide act” against Armenians in his upcoming tautology.

In the eighth decade of his life, Ocampo is seemingly too busy with his age-related discomforts to miss the daily updates on the operation of the Lachin road. Probably, he has not seen the videos of Armenians waiting in a queue at the Lachin border checkpoint to cross into Armenia from Karabakh or vice versa. For instance, over 2,000 Armenians used the checkpoint for their travels between Armenia and Karabakh since its installation in April of this year.

Most likely, greybeard Ocampo is also unaware of the gratitude of the Armenian population of Karabakh to the Azerbaijani border guards for their polite and careful service, including immediate medical assistance on the spot.

A brief look into the Argentine’s blurry past could dig out some clues to explain the reasons for the new chapter of his dishonesty.

An old friend

This is not the first time Ocampo and Armenians are mentioned in the same story. The South American lawyer is an old friend of Armenians. During his tenure as the first Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) from 2003 to 2012, he held meetings with high-ranking officials from Yerevan, among which there were commanders of the forces that once occupied the territories of Azerbaijan.

So, in 2010, he traveled to Armenia for attending the 37th Congress of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) in the capital Yerevan. Ocampos was warmly welcomed by the country’s then-president Serzh Sargsyan. Let’s quickly note that Sarsgyan was one of the commanders of the Armenian occupant forces during the First Karabakh War from 1991-1994. He even admitted to his participation in the Khojaly genocide of Azerbaijanis in an interview with British Journalist Thomas de Waal back in 2000.

Ocampo and Sargsyan during a meeting in Yerevan, Armenia in 2010

“Before Khojaly, the Azerbaijanis thought that they were joking with us, they thought that the Armenians were people who could not raise their hand against the civilian population. We needed to put a stop to all that. And that’s what happened,” Sargsyan told de Waal.

By the way, 613 ethnic Azerbaijanis were killed and later their bodies were desecrated by the Armenian troops during the occupation of the town of Khojaly on February 26, 1992. The atrocities were later recognized as the Khojaly genocide of Azerbaijanis and acknowledged officially by sixteen countries, as well as the Scottish parliament in the UK, the 57-country Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and 22 state governments in the United States.

Azerbaijanis forcibly expelled from their houses by Armenian troops during the First Karabakh War

It should be a second-to-none case having Ocampo, the ICC chief prosecutor, and Sargsyan, an admitter of war crimes, around the same table. It is up to our readers to draw conclusions.

To continue, Ocampos again appeared in Armenia in April 2015, on the 100th anniversary of the so-called “Armenian genocide”, where he lauded the host country as “a leader in genocide prevention”. His purpose of the visit was to advocate for the “genocide” that has not been testified to in any official and historical documents.

That’s the next moment putting Ocampo in a hot seat: 2015 marked also the 23rd anniversary of the Khojaly genocide, a pinnacle of the unforeseen documented chronicle of the Armenian atrocities against Azerbaijanis. Once again, it is up to our esteemed readers to question the “honesty” of the Argentine lawyer.

In the meantime, during both visits of Ocampo to Armenia, the Azerbaijani lands were under Armenia’s occupation as a result of a war that killed over 30,000 Azerbaijanis and displaced over one million. Seemingly, the “human rights” for the South American jurist were limited to those concerning only Armenians. Or he was “silenced” to talk about the rights of humans – the rights of Azerbaijanis - violated by Armenia.

Ocampo’s offshore camp

The reincarnation of greybeard Ocampo by Armenians paves the way to also shedding light on his notorious offshore transaction records.

On August 15, 2012, two months after leaving his senior job at the ICC, USD 50,000 was transferred to Ocampo's account at the Dutch bank ABN Amro. The money was channelled from an account in Switzerland and sent to Europe by the Tain Bay Corporation, a firm based in Panama.

The Argentine got notifications about more cash flowing into his account in the following months. At least USD 140,000 was transferred to the account in the Netherlands in several tranches -- always from Panama, and always via Switzerland.

According to the commercial register of Panama, a company named Furman Management acted as president of Tain Bay. But documents obtained by the French investigative site Mediapart and analyzed by DER SPIEGEL and journalists with the European Investigative Collaboration (EIC) network reveal who was truly behind the Tain Bay Corporation in Panama: Ocampo himself and his wife. After the end of his high-profile tenure as ICC chief prosecutor, he seemingly wanted to shift his assets discreetly.

This makes it all the more surprising that Ocampo had involvement with offshore companies during his term. According to the documents, the chief prosecutor and his wife were shareholders of the shell company Yemana Trading, registered in the BVI. The company was managed by Mossack Fonseca, the law firm whose offshore businesses were exposed by the "Panama Papers."

The Panama City offices of Mossack Fonseca

Tain Bay wasn't Ocampo's only offshore company. The documents show that Ocampo was also connected to a firm on the British Virgin Islands. His wife was apparently behind Lucia Enterprises in Belize. The company he most recently owned is Transparent Markets, a firm registered in Uruguay, a country known as a safe haven for tax evaders.

The documents indicate that Ocampo attached great importance to keeping his off-shore companies secret. Why? According to the statutes of the ICC the chief prosecutor, a position Argentine lawyer Moreno Ocampo held from 2003 to 2012, must be a person of “high moral character”. Moreover, it states: “Neither the Prosecutor nor a Deputy Prosecutor shall engage in any activity which is likely to interfere with his or her prosecutorial functions or to affect confidence in his or her independence. They shall not engage in any other occupation of a professional nature.”

However, during an interview in London with the German newspaper DER SPIEGEL, Ocampo did not deny the existence of his offshore companies and claimed them to be “legal”.

"Offshore companies are not illegal," he said, adding that in the Argentinian banking system, deposits were not secure from interference. "I had to protect myself in a country where the banks (may) one day decide to take your money. So, I had money outside Argentina," he said.

Ocampo was then convinced that he has not done anything “wrong” as an ICC top official, while putting the blame on the organisation for his covert money laundering scheme, saying ICC “never asked” about his offshore business, which encouraged him to lead the underground network.