At Football Hacking Trial, Rui Pinto Says He's Whistleblower, Not Criminal
Portuguese whistleblower Rui Pinto, accused of hacking computer systems of a number of European football teams, said as his trial opened that he did it to reveal corruption and not for personal gain.
“My work as a ‘whistleblower’ is finished. I never received money for what I did. I’m not a hacker, I’m a whistleblower. I made a lot of important information public that otherwise would never have been known,” he said after 90 charges were read.
He said he was “shocked and disgusted” by what he found, and that he's worked with foreign and national authorities to help investigate alleged crimes in football.
A Lisbon court is hearing the case against the 31-year-old who was extradited in 2019 from Hungary where he had lived since 2015 after posts on his Football Leaks website embarrassed star players, top clubs and influential agents.
He sat alone in the court facing three judges, as is customary in Portugal and stood by his assertions he was acting in the public interest. While admitting he used a pseudonym to protect himself, he said he wasn’t a criminal, the Associated Press reported
His website detailed transfer fees and salaries of such stars as Brazil’s Neymar, then at Barcelona; Radamel Falcao at Monaco and Gareth Bale at Real Madrid, also alleging that Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain violated the game's spending rules.
His lawyers said Pinto helped authorities to expose crime and corruption in sports in Europe and beyond, especially shadowy financial transactions
They said Pinto was about to enter a witness protection program in France, with whose authorities he was cooperating on football investigations, before he was arrested, and has cooperated with authorities in Belgium, Switzerland and Malta
He was released from pre-trial detention in Lisbon in August after agreeing to cooperate with Portuguese police and entering a witness protection program, putting him “in the weird position of being accused and a protected witness at the same time.”
He fears his life to be in danger; at the same time, if found guilty on all counts, Pinto could face decades in prison. A verdict is not expected for months.
Pinto admits releasing 70 million documents on transactions involving top European football clubs for which the charges include attempted blackmail, breach of correspondence and data theft
His lawyers said in a letter to the court that Pinto was "outraged" by illicit money-making in football and looked into what was going on because authorities weren't doing enough, said Deutsche Welle.
Pinto said that a "substantial part" of the information he revealed was anonymously leaked to him, not hacked as his lawyers called him "a very important European whistleblower.
They plan to call 45 defense witnesses, including Edward Snowden, a former US intelligence agent charged with espionage, and former financial judged Eva Joly from France.The German news magazine Der Spiegel first published material from Football Leaks in 2016 and while Pinto said he provided the documents he told Der Spiegel that he "acted in good faith."
His site in 2015 began sending out information about money and corruption ruling “The Beautiful Game,” challenging widespread public perception of football as sport and shedding more light on it as the biggest sports business in the world.
“I initiated a spontaneous movement of revelations about the football industry,” he said, The Guardian reported earlier. “So, I am not the only one involved. Over time, more and more new sources have been added, who have shared their material with me, and the database grew.
The tale began on Sept. 29, 2015 when The Record columnist Antonio Varela in Portugal received an email leading him to a blog entry welcoming him to Football Leaks, said The New Yorker. “This project aims to show the hidden side of football. Unfortunately, the sport we love so much is rotten and it is time to say ‘enough.’”