Moreno-Ocampo To Investigate… Crimes Against Soccer

I originally thought it was a story in The Onion, but once again truth is stranger than fiction:

Top international prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, best known for pursuing war criminals, has been nominated as chief investigator at FIFA, soccer’s scandal-plagued governing body, with a brief to probe match-fixing and corruption.

FIFA’s executive committee is due to discuss the appointment of a chief investigator within the next few weeks as part of a proposed clean-up following a string of graft cases.

In March, FIFA’s executive approved plans to split the ethics committee, which looks into wrongdoing by officials, into separate divisions with one to investigate cases and one to judge them.

Moreno-Ocampo, whose term as chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague ends in June, has been nominated to head the investigations team, said Mark Pieth, a professor from the Swiss-based Institute of Governance.

I’m going to defer to Mark Kersten on this one, because I’ll say something snarky that I’ll regret. I will add, though, that FIFA was not Moreno-Ocampo’s first choice: according to sources at Harvard, he actively sought a Chair at Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, but was not offered the position — for reasons that are not yet clear.