The trial of Rui Pinto, the Portuguese man behind the “Football Leaks” is over. The deliberation is scheduled for April 28.
The trial of the whistleblower behind the ‘Football Leaks’ revelations, a 34-year-old Portuguese man accused of hacking and attempted extortion, concluded in Lisbon on Monday, with the court having reserved its decision to April 28. “I am fully aware of having committed illegalitiessaid the defendant Rui Pinto, speaking before the judges at the end of the hearing of a trial that opened more than two years ago.
The documents disclosed by theFootball Leaksfrom the end of 2015 brought to light questionable football business practices involving famous players and clubs, leading to tax adjustments and the opening of legal proceedings in several European countries. Rui Pinto responds to 89 acts of computer hacking, which range from the violation of correspondence to the theft of data that he allegedly committed against the Sporting Portugal club, the Doyen Sports investment fund, the Portuguese Football Federation, a major firm lawyers and even Portuguese public prosecutors.
He is also on trial for attempted extortion. According to the prosecution, thehackerwanted to blackmail Doyen’s boss, the Portuguese Nélio Lucas, demanding between 500,000 and one million euros to stop publishing compromising documents. “There’s no doubt that he’s a whistleblower” and no “a computer criminal“, pleaded Monday his lawyer Francisco Teixeira da Mota, stressing that his client had “never earned a pennywith his activity.
«I wasn’t going to plead acquittal, that wouldn’t make sense. A suspended prison sentence would be sufficient.“, he said, while his client had already confessed to having committed computer intrusions and regretted his behavior towards Doyen Sports. The public prosecutor, who did not recognize his status as a whistleblower, requested his conviction without specifying whether he should receive a prison sentence. Rui Pinto spent more than a year in detention provisionally following his arrest in Hungary in January 2019, before agreeing to cooperate with the authorities in other cases, becoming both a defendant and a protected witness.
After making his first revelations directly on the internet, Rui Pinto entrusted millions of documents from 2016 to a consortium of European media which revealed tax evasion mechanisms, suspicions of fraud and corruption involving several celebrities. international soccer. The Portuguese is also at the origin of the “Luanda Leaks“, an investigation published in January 2020 accusing the Angolan businesswoman Isabel dos Santos of having accumulated an immense fortune fraudulently.
