Poiares Maduro highlights pressure from Football Leaks’ revelations for football reforms – Portugal

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 increased scrutiny in football, creating pressure for reforms in the sector.

“Football Leaks has certainly had some impact. What I know is mainly through revelations made by journalists, based on information revealed by Football Leaks and which has brought some pressure for reform,” said the former Deputy and Development Minister Regional in the government led by Pedro Passos Coelho, who was heard as a witness at the 40th session of the trial, underway at the Central Criminal Court of Lisbon.

Miguel Poiares Maduro justified: “The revelations made are certainly of public interest, at least most of the ones I have seen in the newspapers, as they reveal conflicts of interest and, to that extent, had a positive contribution to the transparency of football, unfortunately, still insufficient, in my opinion”.

The jurist’s résumé also includes a period of about 10 months as president of the FIFA Governing Committee, between July 2016 and May 2017, which allowed him to have a deeper knowledge of the reality of football and gave rise to a very critical view in regarding the organization and mode of operation of its main structures.

“The culture of organization and functioning of football and its organisations, including the absence of scrutiny mechanisms, originates from the time when clubs were amateurs. But today football is something equivalent to 3.7% of the European GDP and this 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.

Consequently, the witness listed for the defense of the defendant Rui Pinto argued that “the notion of the rule of law is foreign to the organization of the football world” and that this world is governed by a “selective application of the rules”, based on political calculations and economic, while condemning that structures such as FIFA and UEFA act simultaneously as “regulators and economic agents”, making the idea of ​​self-regulation practically impossible.

“It requires working upstream in culture and is essentially a regulation problem. And this regulation will not be created internally. Like any cartel, it will not reform itself 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 short of time because I was there doing something, if you allow me the joke”.

Miguel Poiares Maduro was also questioned about an opinion article he wrote and about his position regarding the use of information obtained illegally. At this level, the jurist and doctorate in Law expressed only an overview, regardless of the specific case of Football Leaks.

“There are two things: the evidence may have been illegally obtained and be punished in this context, another is that this information can be used in other processes”, 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 courts: my opinion is much more open than what I know to be dominant in Portugal.”

As for Luanda Leaks, whose origin of the revelations also had the creator of Football Leaks at its origin, focusing on the business of Angolan businesswoman Isabel dos Santos (daughter of former president José Eduardo dos Santos), Miguel Poiares Maduro also signed the thesis of being at stake “a matter of public interest” and condemned the involvement of “lawyers’ offices in legal architectures” which, apparently, had the objective of concealing financial movements and whose origin allegedly had “criminal activity”.

“They were important because they reveal the existence of a pattern of behavior on the part of officials from another country with an impact on our economy, they raise signs of potential crimes and also reveal some type of behavior – which, at least from an ethical point of view, seems to me doubtful – of jurists who helped in the construction of legal buildings to evade the norms”, he summed up.

Also heard this morning was the director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Gerard Ryle, responsible for disseminating 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, noting the respect for the law of the United States.

“No journalist should refuse the disclosure of information of public interest. In American law, the origin of 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 releasing the documents had to do with his concern for fighting corruption.”

Rui Pinto, 32, is responsible for a total of 90 crimes: 68 of improper access, 14 of violation of correspondence, six of illegitimate access, targeting entities such as Sporting, Doyen, the law firm PLMJ, the Portuguese Federation of Football (FPF) and the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), and also for computer sabotage to Sporting’s SAD and extortion, as attempted. This last crime concerns Doyen and it was also what led to the prosecution of 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 he is, for security reasons, included in the protection program for witnesses in an undisclosed location and under police protection.