The jurist and university professor Miguel Poiares Maduro considered this Thursday in court that the revelations made by the Football Leaks website contributed to greater transparency and reinforced scrutiny in football, creating pressure for reforms to be carried out in the sector.
“Football Leaks certainly had an impact. What I know is mainly through revelations made by journalists, based on information revealed by Football Leaks and which has brought some pressure towards reform,” said the former Deputy Minister for Development Regional government led by Pedro Passos Coelho, who was heard as a witness at the 40th session of the trial, ongoing at the Central Criminal Court of Lisbon.
Miguel Poiares Maduro justified: “The revelations made are certainly in the public interest, at least the majority of those I have known in the newspapers, inasmuch as they reveal conflicts of interest and, to that extent, they had a positive contribution to the transparency of football, unfortunately, still insufficient, in my opinion “.
The jurist’s curriculum also includes a 10-month stint in the presidency of the FIFA Governance Committee, between July 2016 and May 2017, which allowed him to have a more in-depth knowledge of the reality of football and gave rise to a very critical view in in relation to the organization and operation of its main structures.
“The culture of organization and functioning of football and its organizations, including the absence of scrutiny mechanisms, originates from the time when clubs were amateurs. But today football is something equivalent to 3.7% of European GDP and this activity is in the hands of organizations that maintain completely archaic forms of governance and that function as a political cartel, with a very strong concentration of power at the top “, he analyzed.
Therefore, the witness listed by the defense of the defendant Rui Pinto defended that “the notion of the rule of law is foreign to the organization of the world of football” and that this world is governed by a “selective application of the rules”, based on political calculations and economic, while condemning structures like FIFA and UEFA to act simultaneously as “regulators and economic agents”, practically making the idea of self-regulation virtually unfeasible.
“It requires working upstream in culture and is essentially a regulatory problem. And that regulation will not be created internally. Like any cartel, you will not reform yourself and the reform will have to be imposed from the outside,” he noted, explaining the reason for the short duration of this experience: “I was only a short time because I was there doing something, if I may joke”.
Miguel Poiares Maduro was also questioned because of an opinion article he wrote and about his position regarding the use of information obtained illegally. At this level, the lawyer and doctor of law expressed only an overview, regardless of the specific case of Football Leaks.
“There are two things: the evidence could have been obtained illegally and be punished in that context, another is that information could be used in other cases”, he said, reinforcing: “Regardless of the illegal origin or not of this documentation, if it raises matters of public interest it is worth worth discussing. Another question is whether or not this documentation should be used in court: my opinion is much more open than what I know to be dominant in Portugal “.
As for Luanda Leaks, whose origin of the revelations was also born by the creator of Football Leaks, focusing on the business of Angolan businesswoman Isabel dos Santos (daughter of former President José Eduardo dos Santos), Miguel Poiares Maduro also endorsed the thesis “matter of public interest” at stake and condemned the involvement of “law firms in legal architectures” that, apparently, had as their objective the concealment of financial movements and whose origin would allegedly have “criminal activity”.
“They were important because they reveal the existence of a pattern of behavior on the part of those in charge of another country with an impact on our economy, they give rise to indications of potential crimes and they also reveal some type of behavior – which, at least from an ethical point of view, seems to me doubtful – of lawyers who helped in the construction of legal buildings to evade the rules “, he summarized.
Also heard this morning was the director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Gerard Ryle, responsible for publicizing the work on the Luanda Leaks case. The witness, heard by videoconference from Australia, defended the validity and legality of the work carried out between 2019 and 2020, signaling the respect for the law of the United States.
“No journalist should refuse to disclose information of public interest. In American law, the source of the information is not distinguished if it has a public interest. We comply with American law in its terms”, he stressed, also expressing his impression of Rui Pinto: “My impression was that he was sincere and that everything he had done with regard to the release of the documents had to do with the concern he gave to the fight against corruption.”
Rui Pinto, 32, is responsible for a total of 90 crimes: 68 of undue access, 14 of violation of correspondence, six of illegitimate access, targeting entities such as Sporting, Doyen, the PLMJ law firm, the Portuguese Federation of Football (FPF) and the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), and also for computer sabotage to Sporting’s SAD and for extortion, in the attempted form. This last crime concerns Doyen and was also what led to the pronunciation of the lawyer Aníbal Pinto.
The creator of Football Leaks has been free since August 7, “due to his collaboration” with the Judiciary 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.
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