Lisbon (AFP)
He is at the origin of "Football Leaks", these information leaks which shed a harsh light on the excesses of football business: the Portuguese "hacker" Rui Pinto is tried from Friday in Lisbon for various computer crimes and attempted extortion.
Tracked by Portuguese justice to Hungary, where he lived anonymously before being extradited to his country in March 2019, the 31-year-old hacker spent nearly a year in pre-trial detention.
Subsequently assigned to residence, he cooperated with the Portuguese justice by giving him the keys to a mass of encrypted data containing unpublished documents in his possession during his arrest in Budapest.
Released last month, he will take his place in the dock while he also benefits from a witness protection program in exchange for his cooperation with the justice system in other cases.
"I hope to be acquitted because I am a whistleblower and I acted in good faith", affirmed Rui Pinto in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, the first medium to which he delivered documents of " Football Leaks ”, in 2016.
He would have obtained this information by illegally accessing the computer systems of a host of football clubs and intermediaries: agents, lawyers and investment funds.
- Snowden among the witnesses -
These revelations, which highlighted tax evasion mechanisms, suspicions of fraud and corruption involving several star players and club managers, led to the opening of legal proceedings in France, Spain and Belgium. , and in Switzerland.
Among the many cases that are attributable to him: the tax problems of Cristiano Ronaldo linked to his time at Real Madrid, the affair of the ethnic filing of Paris SG or the tolerance granted by UEFA to alleged breaches of the financial fair play of the Paris SG and Manchester City.
In March, the Portuguese justice also launched a vast operation targeting the main clubs of the country and the powerful Portuguese agent Jorge Mendes, due to suspicions of tax evasion during player transfers.
In January, Rui Pinto revealed that he was also behind the "Luanda Leaks", an investigation denouncing the fraudulent origin of the fortune of Angolan billionaire Isabel dos Santos, daughter of former president José Eduardo dos Santos.
Representatives of the "hacker", who described him from the outset as "a great European whistleblower", will call 45 witnesses including Edward Snowden, a former US intelligence employee charged with espionage, or the former judge French financier Eva Joly.
- "Second trial of the century" -
At the rate of three sessions per week over the next few months, the Lisbon court will look into the 90 charges held by the prosecution, which range from attempted extortion to hacking, from correspondence violation to theft. of data.
Rui Pinto is notably accused of having tried in 2015 to blackmail the boss of the Doyen Sports investment fund, the Portuguese Nélio Lucas, by asking him between 500,000 and one million euros to stop publishing compromising documents on a site which he had created before handing over his findings to the consortium of investigative journalists.
Nélio Lucas ran Dean Sports on behalf of a brotherhood of Kazakh-Turkish oligarchs, whose dubious methods were brought to light by the "Football Leaks".
"After the trial of Antoine Deltour, who was acquitted, it is the second trial of this century of an exceptional whistleblower", told AFP the defense of Rui Pinto, referring to the French the origin of the LuxLeaks tax optimization case.
In Portugal, the crime of attempted extortion, the most serious of the charges against Pinto, carries a sentence of between 2 years and 5 months, and 10 years in prison.
© 2020 AFP