Football Leaks hacker Rui Pinto keeps police protection after Lisbon assault
Portuguese authorities have confirmed that whistleblower Rui Pinto will remain under police protection following procedural irregularities in the review process.
Rui Pinto's witness protection extended after review process ruled flawed
Rui Pinto, the computer hacker behind the Football Leaks website whose disclosures helped trigger the Premier League's financial investigation into Manchester City, will remain under police protection, Portuguese authorities have confirmed, as aljazeera.com reported on Friday.
His protection measures, which had been due to expire on Saturday, 10 October, will stay in place pending a new decision, Portugal's Ministry of Justice said in a statement. A previous resolution was nullified because Pinto had not been "duly informed of the reasons for the decision" and had not had the opportunity to challenge it.
Pinto's lawyers last week denounced irregularities in the proceedings, pointing to what they described as real and ongoing threats facing their client. The 37-year-old was assaulted in Lisbon last April and subsequently said he had been forced to move to a secret location "due to the multiple death threats" he had received.
Pinto has held protected witness status since 2020, after agreeing to grant Portuguese authorities access to millions of encrypted files accumulated before his arrest. He had been detained in Hungary, where he was living, in January 2019 and subsequently extradited to Portugal, spending more than a year in pre-trial detention before agreeing to cooperate with investigators.
During his first trial, the former history student and self-taught computer expert admitted hacking into computer systems to obtain millions of documents, which he began publishing online in late 2015. That material was passed to a consortium of European investigative media outlets, exposing questionable practices involving high-profile football players, clubs and agents. The disclosures led to tax adjustments and judicial investigations across several countries.
In the Manchester City case specifically, Pinto obtained private documents indicating the club had breached Premier League financial rules between 2009 and 2018. An independent commission subsequently found City guilty on all but one of the 115 charges brought against them.
A Portuguese court handed Pinto a suspended four-year sentence in September 2023 after finding him guilty of attempted extortion, illegal access to data and breach of correspondence. He continues to cooperate with investigators from other European countries, where he holds the dual status of both defendant and protected witness within the Portuguese justice system.
Source: Google News IE — Crime (en)