Suspended for ten months for procedural reasons, Rui Pinto’s trial was resumed this Friday for a few minutes: the court was unable to hear from a distance, by videoconference, two witnesses linked to Doyen, the investment fund that traded football players and loaned money to sports clubs.
The interruption of the trial was intended for the hacker to consult, under the supervision of the Judiciary Police, the e-mail boxes allegedly exfiltrated by himself. Present on one of the hard drives seized from Rui Pinto in Hungary, this information was stored in an appendix to the case: after several protests, the court authorized the complainant to consult the material, however, preventing any copying. However, the defendant’s lawyer, Teixeira da Mota, informed the judges this Friday that his client only started to consult the information on the hard disk last Monday, since before that it was necessary to proceed with the indexing of this material, operation done through a machine.
The explanations given by Rui Pinto, who responds, among other things, for having allegedly tried to blackmail Doyen, having even negotiated his hiring by this group, may last for more than one trial session, his legal representative anticipates. . after having released online confidential information about the activity of this fund in the world of football, the defendant turned to the lawyer Aníbal Pinto – also defendant in this case – so that he could mediate his hiring by Doyen. What he always claimed to justify his actions was that he was just trying to understand the value of the information he had collected, and he had no intention of receiving any money – although, according to the Public Ministry, his intention was to withdraw between half a million and a million euros to the investment fund, for which it used a fictitious name.
on one email sent to his lawyer in October 2015, Rui Pinto puts forward some possibilities for receiving the salaries paid by Doyen, which ended up never happening: “Was there still a chance that I could create a company in a offshore, for example in Malta or Cyprus. From what I saw in Malta, the tax is 35%, but in reality it is only 5%, because 30% is returned”. The idea, he explained, was to avoid double taxation.
Before finishing the consultation of the external disk, Rui Pinto will not give statements in court. Therefore, the start of his explanations before the magistrates of the Campus of Justice, in Lisbon, was scheduled for 13 May in a case that became known as Football Leaks.
In its most recent post on Twitter, the hacker says that analysis and study of the millions of documents from the Football Leaks “has allowed to make known revelations of enormous value and importance, such as those concerning Manchester City”. According to the latest issue of the magazine The mirrorwhich accessed new documents resulting from computer hacking, the English club was reportedly financed by the Government of Abu Dhabi, more specifically by the Executive Affairs Agency.
Rui Pinto is accused of 90 crimes: attempted extortion, illegitimate access, improper access, violation of correspondence and one of computer sabotage. After Friday’s session, another interruption is planned, with the trial to resume again on April 22. His lawyer recently submitted documents to the court aimed at questioning the legitimacy of former Doyen administrator Nélio Lucas to file a criminal complaint against Rui Pinto in 2015. At that time, Teixeira da Mota defends, he would no longer be the legal representative of this company.
