Pinto hacked lots of clubs and businesses and leaked plenty of juicy stuff about other parties.
8. Rui Pinto - Criminal Hacker or Hero Whistleblower?
Rui Pinto was identified as the source of Football Leaks by Portuguese magazine Sábado in September 2018. He was arrested in Budapest on 16 January 2019 at the request of the Portuguese authorities for suspicion of attempted qualified extortion, violation of
secrecy and illegally accessing information. His lawyers argued that as a whistleblower he was entitled to protection under European law. However he was extradited to Portugal two months later and was charged with 147 crimes by the
Public Ministry.
Portuguese prosecutors claim that Pinto attempted to extort Doyen Sports for one million euros using the identity of Artem Lobuzov, while Pinto's legal team stated that "the team set up by the Public Prosecution to investigate criminality in the football world seems to be more dedicated to pursuing those who denounce it than investigating those who practice the crimes". His case was taken up by French lawyer
William Bourdon, who had previously defended
Julian Assange and
Edward Snowden.
On 16 April 2019, Pinto was one of the winners of the European whistleblower award promoted by the European United Left (GUE / NGL), along with
Julian Assange and
Yasmine Motarjemi.
On 7 August 2020, Pinto was released from prison, pending his trial.
9. Rui Pinto’s Trial
Pinto was put on trial for computer hacking and extortion
The trial started in Lisbon on 4 September 2020, surrounded by strong security measures, never seen before in Portugal. In a short statement before the panel of judges, Pinto said he was a whistleblower who made public a lot of important information which would otherwise never be known, and that he never received money.
In several trial sessions, dubious and allegedly criminal acts perpetrated by those in charge of the investigation were identified, having led the panel of judges to make two reports aimed at investigating the conduct of inspectors of the Portuguese Judicial Police.
Since agreeing to cooperate with authorities in other cases, the 33-year-old Portuguese, who spent more than a year in pre-trial detention following his arrest in Hungary in January 2019, has been both defendant and protected witness.
“Rui Pinto has changed radically and is cooperating in an effective and relevant way,” allowing authorities access to a mass of encrypted data containing unpublished documents in his possession in
Budapest, Portugal’s national director of the Judicial Police, Luis Neves, told the court in May 2021.
On that occasion, the head of the criminal police even criticized the “cynicism and hypocrisy” of the Portuguese judicial system.
Pinto is being tried for 89 hacking offences, which he allegedly committed against the investment fund Doyen Sports, Sporting Lisbon, the Portuguese Football Federation, a law firm, and magistrates of the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic.
He is also on trial for attempted extortion.
The prosecution argues that Pinto tried to blackmail Doyen, which is based in Malta and controlled by a sibling of Kazakh-Turkish oligarchs, by demanding between 500,000 and one million euros to stop him publishing compromising documents on the Internet.
He then leaked documents in 2015. They were published in
Germany’s Spiegel and other European outlets and sparked criminal investigations in countries including Britain and France.
“I was outraged by what I discovered and I decided to make it public,” Pinto said. “I never did anything for money,” he argued at the opening of the trial.
Pinto was also behind the “Luanda Leaks”, published in January 2020 accusing Angolan businesswoman Isabel dos Santos, daughter of former president Jose Eduardo dos Santos, of fraudulently accumulating a fortune estimated at almost 2 billion euros.
Placed in a witness protection program, Pinto allows himself to comment on current events on Twitter, especially on controversies involving soccer and money.
All of Rui Pinto’s hacking and extortion crimes are listed in Sam Knight’s expose “how Football Leaks is exposing corruption in European Soccer” in the New Yorker dated 27.5.19.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/...aks-is-exposing-corruption-in-european-soccer
He has provided revelations about Sporting Lisbon and published various player contracts of Porto, Benfica, Olympique Marseille and FC Twente players.
The 88m of documents he has given to Der Spiegel is twice as large as the Panama Papers expose and 60 times bigger than Edward Snowden’s expose.
He provided correspondence regarding the Super League breakaway plans of Bayern, Barcelona, Juventus, Man United and AC Milan.
He provided revealing documents regarding Ronaldo’s rape accusations and the company Tollinn in the British Virgin Islands which Ronaldo uses to allegedly evade taxes and details of Gareth Bale’s contract where Real announced a fictitious lower fee in order to not offend Ronaldo who was bought for 94m euros.
He has provided confidential information on top players regarding their tax dealings alleging tax evasion, the deal between Porto and Real regarding the buying of Casemiro which included a 700,000 euro fee for the son of Porto’s president, Paul Pogba’s agent Minoia who got paid 49m euros for his role in his transfer and Argentine agents who used shell companies and straw men in their methods to evade taxes.
He was the main player in the extortion and blackmail of The Caledonian Bank and provided information regarding Doyen’s aggressive TPO deals and he also tried to extort Doyen.
PSG’s 1bn euros deal with the Qatar Tourism Authority - a later UEFA investigation showed the true market value of the deal to be as little as 15m euros.
How could the Premier League seriously trust this man - he is clearly a criminal.
www.bbc.co.uk