Rui Pinto’s trial will start on September 4, the source of the Lisbon Court of Appeal (TRL) confirmed to the PUBLIC. THE hacker he is accused of 90 crimes and awaits the start of the trial in a residence controlled by the Judicial Police (PJ), after having spent more than a year in preventive detention.
As far as PUBLIC was able to ascertain, trial sessions are already scheduled until the end of the year.
Between 22 March 2019 and 8 April 2020, the person responsible for the revelations of the Football Leaks e Luanda Leaks was in the prison attached to the headquarters of the PJ, in Lisbon. After having concluded an agreement with the authorities – in which he agreed to passwords for the ten encrypted hard drives that the European authorities were unable to decipher – the hacker was placed under “house arrest”.
Rui Pinto arrived in Portugal after being extradited by the Hungarian authorities. The hacker lived in Budapest, where he sold antiques. It was also in this period that he created the platform Football Leaks, where confidential documents were published that led to investigations of some of the biggest clubs and agents in world football.
Rui Pinto is accused of a crime of attempted extortion, six of illegitimate access, 68 of undue access, 14 of violation of correspondence and one of computer sabotage. THE hacker he was initially accused of 147 crimes by the Public Prosecutor’s Office which, after the decision of the investigating judge to reduce the number of crimes, tried to have the 57 crimes replaced. The TRL did not give reason to the Public Ministry and the 90 crimes did not change.
In January of this year, the defense of the hacker he revealed that the documents that originated the work on the business empire built by Isabel dos Santos, daughter of former Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos and the richest woman on the African continent, had also left him. The Luanda Leaks, as they became known, were a series of works by the International Research Journalism Consortium, which were based on about 715 thousand files collected by Rui Pinto.
These documents showed suspicions of financial schemes allegedly used by Isabel dos Santos and her husband that would have allowed them to withdraw money from the Angolan public purse through tax havens.
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