Within a week, the domino pieces created by Isabel dos Santos in recent years began to fall: first, the global consultant Pricewaterhouse Coopers announced the end of services to the daughter of the former president of Angola, then SONAE went public to express “concern” with the disclosure of the Luanda Leaks case, followed by the departure of the shareholder structure of Eurobic itself and the resignations of three non-executive directors of NÓS, whom he indicated. One of them, Mário Leite da Silva would also resign as chairman of the Board of Directors of Banco de Fomento de Angola. Soon after, Jorge Brito Pereira, a lawyer who has been accompanying Isabel dos Santos for years, announced the end of the lawyer-client relationship with the businesswoman.
At the origin of this world whirlwind, is, as confirmed this Monday, Rui Pinto, the so-called “Benfica hacker”, who is pre-emptively imprisoned in the order of a lawsuit in Portugal. This Monday, in a statement, Rui Pinto’s lawyers, Teixeira da Mota and William Bourdon, state that their client “assumes responsibility” for having provided the Whistleblower Protection Platform in Africa (PPLLAF) with a “hard drive” at the end of 2018 the documents with the recent revelations about Isabel dos Santos’ fortune.
Rui Pinto says, through his lawyers, that he delivered the data related to Isabel dos Santos’ fortune as a “citizenship duty” and “without any counterpart” and says he is “satisfied” with the work of the International Investigation Journalists Consortium , with the participation of 36 media outlets in 20 countries.
In addition to Luanda Leaks, Rui Pinto was also responsible for the public disclosure of hundreds of emails linked from people linked to SL Benfica, which, in 2017, served as a starting point for a criminal investigation, currently with no results in sight. However, already that year, the Judiciary Police carried out a series of searches and an investigating judge concluded, in the order that ordered them, that the data released to the public and other actions of the PJ itself “respect the suspicion of the actions of SLB SAD officers , who, in collusion with personalities from the world of football and refereeing, sought to exert pressure and influence with officials in charge of refereeing and other decision-making structures in national football, with a view to influencing the appointment and classification of referees in this area. ”
It was also based on the elements revealed by Rui Pinto (through the blog “Mercado de Benfica) that it was possible to collect the first suspicions about the E-Toupeira case and how Paulo Gonçalves, former legal advisor at dSADAD incarnate, would have access to information about legal proceedings connected to the club, Paulo Gonçalves, refer, awaiting trial.
In 2019, Rui Pinto also assumed the authorship of the blog “Football Leaks”, which revealed several club documents, linked to player transfers and the circulation of money through offshores. Football Leaks was created in 2015. Pfirst under the pseudonym ‘John’ and later as Rui Pinto, he took over the creation of the blog, which, among other cases, publicized the corruption scandal at FIFA, which led to the arrest of several officials and the subsequent departure of the Swiss Josep Blatter the presidency of the body that oversees world football.
The wealth of information collected by Rui Pinto in recent years was, moreover, briefly described in the prosecuting order of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which attributed to him the crimes of attempted extortion, illegitimate access and violation of correspondence: in addition to public bodies, such as Justice and Homeland Security, the hacker will also have been able to extract documents from Fidequity, linked to Isabel dos Santos, the Fosun Group, Benfica, Barcelona, Manchester United, Real Madrid, Inter Milan and the law firms Vieira de Almeida, Abreu , PLMJ, Vaz Serra and Carlos Osório de Castro, lawyer for Cristiano Ronaldo.
In the criminal case in which he is accused, Rui Pinto’s email address of the former director of the Central Investigation Department for Criminal Action Amadeu Guerra, as well as the email of the Attorney General’s Office, also appears as a target for Rui Pinto.
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