This Thursday, whistleblower Rui Pinto returns to the dock, almost three months after the last trial session in the process. Football Leaks. The interruption, motivated by the restrictions imposed in the fight against the pandemic, comes to an end, said this Wednesday the presiding judge of the Judicial Court of the District of Lisbon, Artur Cordeiro, in a statement.
For the first day on the return of the case – in which Rui Pinto is accused of the perpetration of 90 crimes – the hearing of Ricardo Negrão, director of Information Systems and Technologies of the law firm PLMJ, a company that suffered a computer attack allegedly committed by Rui Pinto. The hearing of the PLMJ employee will begin at 9:30 am.
The return to the courtroom still takes place after the reopening of investigations into the connections between the Judicial Police (PJ) and the Doyen investment fund, during the investigation that led to the arrest of the hacker in Budapest in January 2019.
As the PUBLIC reported on March 25, the Public Ministry decided to resume the investigation of the PJ’s actions in the case, after an initial filing of the complaint made by Ana Gomes. The former MEP used in this complaint the information transmitted by Rui Pinto, during a visit to the prison where the hacker has been in pre-trial detention for more than a year.
Rui Pinto is responsible for a crime of attempted extortion, six of illegitimate access, 68 of undue access, 14 of violation of correspondence and one of computer sabotage.
The second defendant in this case, the lawyer Aníbal Pinto, is accused of a crime of extortion in the attempted form.
After being in preventive detention between March 2019 and April 2020, Rui Pinto began to collaborate with the PJ, giving access to the files that were on the encrypted discs seized in Hungary. The whistleblower is now in an undisclosed location, in a house constantly monitored by the police.
Witnesses such as Jorge Jesus, Bruno de Carvalho and the former head of the Doyen investment fund, businessman Nélio Lucas, have already been heard in this process. Many personalities are yet to be called to court. Rui Pinto’s list of witnesses includes names such as whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Antoine Deltour. Luís Neves, national director of the PJ, will also be heard.
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