Judicial Police Inspector (PJ) José Amador today compared the information on Rui Pinto’s discs, creator of the Football Leaks platform, to a “Pandora’s box”, containing more than 150 email boxes.
Among these mailboxes were the addresses of high-ranking judges, such as former Attorney General Joana Marques Vidal, but also Maria José Morgado, Amadeu Correia and Adriano Cunha, the witness stressed at the fifth session of the trial that takes place at the Central Criminal Court of Lisbon.
“Here are emails from senior judiciary officials, which made it possible to explain some facts that are being investigated in other investigations”, stressed the inspector, underlining: “This was a little ‘Pandora’s box'”.
José Amador said that, among the 12 discs apprehended to Rui Pinto, nine were encrypted, with a total of 23 ‘terabytes’ of information, in which the discs RP3 and RP9 were said to be relevant.
“We are talking about 23 ‘terabytes’ of information. It is something fantastic, a very large amount of information. We are talking about the 12 disks, the capacity fluctuated between one and four ‘terabytes’. For analysis, essentially two disks were revealed, RP3 and RP9, because they had open file systems and had relevant information ”, he explained.
If the disk RP3 – which also contained documentation related to the investigation into the case of Tancos – “has so much to say that it will deserve an isolated approach”, RP9 had the particularity of having “the overwhelming majority of files deleted”, having been detected in forensic forensics.
“When using forensic tools, it is possible to check the presence of other files”, he stressed, adding: “All files are recoverable. Any forensic tool can detect the presence of files and metadata ”.
The computer apprehended by Rui Pinto ended up “not proving to be of particular interest”, with José Amador considering that it was not the machine “that started RP3”, at a time when Luanda Leaks, “at the time, did not exist ”.
Judge Margarida Alves, who leads the panel of judges, again confronted the witness with the possibility of manipulation by the French and Hungarian authorities of the files present on the seized discs, but the inspector reiterated that he did not exist.
“The digital summary is the same. The procedure we had to do was to invest in an adapter that the PJ did not have. The report starts by noting the machine’s data, user and serial number. Everything is duly registered ”, he explained, denoting the existence of three dates in the files’ metadata – creation, modification and last access – and that in none of them was there a date after the seizure.
The inquiry with inspector José Amador, which began in the fourth session, continues on Wednesday at 09:30.
Rui Pinto, 31, is responsible for a total of 90 crimes: 68 of undue access, 14 of violation of correspondence and 6 of illegitimate access, targeting entities such as Sporting, Doyen, PLMJ law firm, the Federation Portuguesa de Futebol and the Attorney General’s Office, and also for computer sabotage to Sporting’s SAD and for extortion, in the attempted form. This last crime concerns Doyen and also led to the pronunciation of the lawyer Aníbal Pinto, then representative of Rui Pinto.
The creator of Football Leaks has been free since August 7, “due to his collaboration” with the Judicial Police (PJ) and his “critical sense”, but is, for security reasons, inserted in the protection program of witnesses in an undisclosed location and under police protection.
