In the second consecutive session of the trial at the Lisbon Central Criminal Court in which the main defendant in the case is making statements, the website creator revealed that interest in the investment fund then led by Nélio Lucas began to materialize with a trip to London from “one of the friends of Football Leaks”.
“It was agreed that he would try to access the Wi-Fi network at Doyen Capital’s facilities. On the last day, he spent the night in a hotel near the premises, bought a specific equipment to capture long-distance wifi networks, but there was a problem: London is an extremely populous city and that is one of the busiest areas. It was practically impossible to have a stable connection, but managed to establish access“, he recalled.
Rui Pinto said that the friend was able to detect the access credentials for guests on Doyen’s computer network and that later it was possible to discover other passwords, allowing “exponential access” to the system. “I was in contact with him. I tried to access from Hungary but I was not successful”, he noted, immediately rejecting responsibility for accessing the computer of Adam Gomes, former chief information officer of Doyen Sports Investment.
“He was already on Adam Gomes’ computer. This was not done by me. I wasn’t informed in detail, it was only when he encountered some obstacle or discovered something interesting. The only thing I did was create the address [email protected]. All email messages were forwarded to that email”, he said, noting that “there was no exfiltration”, but the automatic forwarding of emails after 20 September.
On the other hand, Rui Pinto advanced that the documents relating to Doyen Sports Investment Ltd and Vela Investment Ltd had three different origins – two in Spain and one in Malta -, but he avoided talking about how this information was obtained, in view of a certificate extracted on this matter and before the advice of the lawyer Francisco Teixeira da Mota.
Questioned by the president of the panel of judges, Margarida Alves, about the alleged interest in Doyen Capital and the origins of the money and the subsequent publication of documents of a sporting nature by Doyen Sports Investment, the defendant explained: “A group of kids cannot be required to be able to analyze complex information in 15 days or a month.”.
Rui Pinto also said that the email sent under the name Artem Lobuzov “was not created specifically for the contact with Nélio Lucas”, but ended up being used only in that situation.
“I feel ashamed of this situation. It is very difficult for me to read this type of emails. Nowadays I don’t recognize myself in this, it was a huge mess. Unfortunately, this was taken advantage of by critics to try to reduce the merits of Football Leaks.“, said the main defendant in the case, who took the opportunity to apologize to the other defendant, Aníbal Pinto, the lawyer who was involved in this interaction with Doyen.
Rui Pinto, 33 years old, is responsible for a total of 90 crimes: 68 of improper access, 14 of violation of correspondence, six of illegitimate access, targeting entities such as Sporting, Doyen, the law firm PLMJ, the Portuguese Federation of Football (FPF) and the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), and also for computer sabotage of Sporting’s SAD and for extortion, in the attempted form. This last crime concerns Doyen and was what also led to the indictment of lawyer Aníbal Pinto.
The creator of Football Leaks has been free since August 7, 2020, “due to his collaboration” with the Judiciary Police (PJ) and his “critical sense”, but is, for security reasons, included in the program of witness protection in an undisclosed location and under police protection.
