The architect and commentator of Porto Canal Pedro Bragança this Thursday defended in court the superior public interest of the revelations made by the Football Leaks website, considering that the form of access to information “goes to the background”.
“I don’t want to say that the way in which information is obtained is irrelevant, but, given the dimension of the public interest in these disclosures, the issue of provenance takes a back seat,” said Pedro Bragança, clarifying: “I understand the existence of damage to the parties who see publicized information, but a balance must be produced between the value of the public interest and the harm that is caused”.
In the hearing held at the 39th session of the Football Leaks trial, at the Central Criminal Court of Lisbon, the witness listed by Rui Pinto’s defense also underlined that information that was not intended for disclosure and later became public “had some form of potentially illegitimate access”, either through a worker of the target entity, or through “hacking”.
Pedro Bragança claimed to have contacted the creator of the electronic platform “at the beginning of 2019”, shortly after his identity was known through social networks and that already last year, after Rui Pinto’s release from pre-trial detention, he met in person. the main defendant in this case. From this contact, he admitted having recognized “a genuine interest in helping in the clarification processes of these businesses”.
“He has developed quite a considerable capacity in document analysis, cross-referencing information and building very complex mind maps, which is very important in this type of business,” noted the witness, who defended the existence of “a before and an after” of the Football Leaks.
The witness considered that “football is a phenomenon very exposed to a type of economic and financial crime, because they are businesses in which the value is very difficult to target and suffer from transparency problems”.
“What Football Leaks came to do was to illuminate an unknown part of the economic aspect of football, which was very opaque,” he said.
Stressing that he did not know how Rui Pinto would have had access to the documents, Pedro Bragança also expressed his conviction that he always had the “idea that we were in front of a group of people” at the origin of Football Leaks’ revelations, although he guaranteed not possess any “concrete information” about it.
Asked about the possible links between the electronic platform created by Rui Pinto and the blog ‘Mercado de Benfica’, the witness highlighted the existence of clear differences.
“In the typology there is no similarity. While in Football Leaks documents were revealed separately, in the ‘Mercado de Benfica’ the information was placed non-surgically and massively. This blog made massive revelations about Benfica, specifically aimed at a football club . And while in Football Leaks there were texts to position themselves on the issues, in ‘Mercado de Benfica’ I think it was raw information,” he said.
Aside from the facts of this process, the Porto Canal commentator also confessed to having recently given information to Rui Pinto regarding the possible participation of the creator of Football Leaks in the parliamentary inquiry committee to Novo Banco.
“It’s a topic that personally interests me a lot and I know it’s a topic that also interests Rui Pinto. I myself have already provided him with information, documentation that I myself received and that was entrusted to me. I know he has this capacity for analysis and I forwarded it so he could enrich his testimony in the commission of inquiry. He could transform this information into knowledge and make it public in the commission”, he declared, assuring that he also passed “part of the information to a member” of the commission, as well as to a journalist.
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 at large 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 program for the protection of witnesses in an undisclosed location and under police protection.
.
