A Portuguese court is due on Monday to deliver its verdict on hacker Rui Pinto (34), whose flood of “Football Leaks” revelations exposed dirty dealings in international football.
It was the biggest information leak in sports history and sparked criminal investigations in Belgium, Britain, France, Spain and Switzerland.
Pinto is charged with 89 hacking offences and with attempted extortion, a crime punishable in Portugal by between two and 10 years in prison.
He argues he is a whistleblower whose actions exposed underhand dealings involving top football stars, clubs and agents.
Between 2015 and 2018, he shared 18.6 million documents on the internet and with a consortium of European newspapers, which published details.
The revelations shook the football world.
They included the salaries of Lionel Messi and Neymar, an accusation of rape against Cristiano Ronaldo, alleged financial sleight of hand at Manchester City and ethnic profiling at Paris Saint Germain.
Defendant and witness
Pinto finds himself in the unique position of being both a defendant and a protected witness in Portugal.
When his trial commenced in September 2020, Pinto informed the court that he was deeply disturbed by the information he had uncovered and took pride in making it public knowledge.
However, he has confessed to using illicit methods to acquire certain documents.
Among his alleged victims are prominent entities such as Sporting Lisbon, the Portuguese Football Federation, legal professionals, judges, and Doyen Sports, an investment fund based in Malta and operated by Kazakh-Turkish oligarchs.
Pinto was apprehended in Hungary in 2019 and subsequently extradited to Portugal, where he spent a year in custody before agreeing to collaborate with Portuguese authorities on other cases, granting them access to encrypted documents he had obtained.
The French authorities have also sought his cooperation over the “Luanda Leaks”, a release of 715,000 documents providing compromising information on Angolan billionaire Isabel dos Santos, daughter of former president Jose Eduardo dos Santos.
Dos Santos, who was formerly Africa’s wealthiest woman, has been entangled in numerous legal proceedings, accused of diverting billions of dollars from Angolan state enterprises throughout her father’s four-decade-long tenure in office.