LISBON — The Portuguese whistleblower behind the “Football
Leaks” revelations, Rui Pinto, is due to start testifying on Monday in the
Lisbon court where he is on trial for computer hacking and attempted extortion.
اضافة اعلان
Apart from a brief statement read at an earlier
stage of the trial in September 2020, this is the first time the man who shook
the world of soccer business will speak before the judges.
His interrogation, the last step before closing
arguments, is likely to continue for several sessions.
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encrypted data containing unpublished documents in his possession in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.
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