The process
Rui Pinto is on trial from Monday in the Lisbon court. The Portuguese hacker is on trial for hacking and attempted extortion.
The trial, which began in September 2020, will give way to Pinto’s testimony before the judges, the last stage before the closing arguments, for the first time since the start of the case. This could take several sessions.
In total, he must answer for 89 acts of computer hacking, which range from the breach of correspondence to the theft of data and which he allegedly committed against the Doyen Sports investment fund, the Sporting Portugal club, the Portuguese (Site notre blog d’information) Federation, an important law firm and even magistrates from the general prosecutor’s office of the Republic.
He is also on trial for attempted extortion for which he risks between two and ten years in prison.
The case
Rui Pinto had denounced the affairs of (Site notre bureau spécialisé)-business in December 2016 under the pseudonym of « John » where he revealed the financial and corruption scandals. The Portuguese had unveiled more than 18.6 million documents on the functioning of international (Site notre bureau spécialisé) bodies. These available revelations implicated some of the biggest clubs like PSG or Monaco, players in world (Site notre bureau spécialisé), some of whom were linked to agent Jorge Mendes, and led to tax adjustments and the opening of legal proceedings in several European countries.
For the prosecution, he wanted to blackmail Doyen’s boss, the Portuguese Nélio Lucas, by demanding between 500,000 and one million euros to stop publishing compromising documents on the internet for this fund based in Malta and controlled by a sibling of Kazakh-Turkish oligarchs.
These available revelations also push the national financial prosecutor’s office to open an investigation, and Rui Pinto would also cooperate with the French body.
Critics of Portuguese justice
While he had agreed to cooperate with the authorities on other cases after pre-trial detention following his arrest in Hungary in January 2019, his trial in Portugal is quite suspicious.
Rui Pinto is both a defendant and a protected witness and his collaboration was underlined by the national director of the judicial police during his testimony in May 2021.
« Rui Pinto has changed radically and is cooperating in an effective and relevant way », by allowing the authorities to access a mass of encrypted data containing unpublished documents in his possession in Budapest, revealed Luis Neves.
The latter had also criticized « the cynicism and hypocrisy » of the Portuguese judicial system, which does not provide for the status of repentant and does not reward denunciation.