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Football Leaks: Instruction in Rui Pinto’s lawsuit starts on December 12 – Justice

The investigation of the case by Rui Pinto, creator of Football Leaks, accused of 147 crimes of illegitimate access, violation of correspondence, computer sabotage and extortion attempt, begins on December 12, a judicial source told Lusa today.

The same source stated that the criminal investigating judge (JIC) only scheduled for that day investigative steps, such as the interrogation of the lawyer Aníbal Pinto (who in the request for the opening of the instruction asked to be heard), and an instructive debate, after which set a date for reading the instructional decision.

The investigation, an optional phase that aims to decide by a JIC if the case continues and in what manner for trial, was requested by the defense of the two defendants in the case, Rui Pinto and the lawyer Aníbal Pinto, and will take place at the Lisbon Criminal Instruction Court , at the Campus of Justice.

The crime of extortion, in the attempted form, concerns the attempted extortion of Doyen (between 500 thousand and one million euros), carried out by Rui Pinto on the morning of October 3, 2015, with the intermediation of the lawyer Aníbal Chick.

On September 19, the Public Ministry (MP) accused Rui Pinto of 147 crimes, 75 of which were illegitimate access, 70 of violation of correspondence, seven of them aggravated, one of computer sabotage and one of extortion attempt, for accessing the systems information technology from Sporting, the Doyen investment fund, the law firm PLMJ, the Portuguese Football Federation and the Attorney General’s Office, and subsequent disclosure of dozens of confidential documents from these entities.

The law firm PLMJ was part of the defense of Benfica in the process known as ‘e-mole’.

The following day, on September 20, the defendant’s defense considered that the MP’s charge “contains numerous falsehoods, nullities and illegalities”, aiming to “silence and destroy” the creator of Football Leaks.

The prosecution of the MP, to which Lusa had access, says that, between November 6, 2018 and January 7, 2019, the defendant “made a total of 307 accesses” to the Attorney General’s Office, and obtained documents from the lawsuits Tancos, BES and Operation Marquês, among others.

Between January 2018 and January 2019, Rui Pinto consulted 12 more cases that are still under legal secrecy.

In preventive detention since March 22 this year, Rui Pinto, 30, was arrested in Hungary and handed over to the Portuguese authorities, on the basis of a European arrest warrant (EAW), which only covered illegal access to Sporting’s computer systems and from Doyen.

As the defendant never renounced the principle of specialty, so that the Portuguese justice could come to accuse and judge Rui Pinto for other facts and crimes than these, the MP had to ask the Hungarian authorities to extend the EAW, which they authorized, based on new facts and evidence found in the course of this investigation, which will give rise to other lawsuits.

Rui Pinto is also suspected of being the author of the theft of Benfica’s emails in 2017.

The prosecution of the MP maintains that, from the beginning of 2015 and until January 16, 2019, “the main defendant equipped himself with technical knowledge and adequate equipment that allowed him to access, in an unauthorized way, computer systems and the third-party email boxes “.

For this purpose, “it installed, on its equipment, several computer programs and digital tools that allowed it, in a covert and anonymous way, to enter the aforementioned computer systems and mailboxes of third parties and to retrieve content from there”.

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