The Football Leaks trial has scheduled Rui Pinto’s testimony for May 13, but the defendant’s lawyer admitted that the deadline may not be met, as the consultation of the seized external disk is delayed.
During the 47th session of the trial, at the Central Criminal Court in Lisbon, lawyer Francisco Teixeira da Mota highlighted the delay in the consultation that takes place at the Judiciary Police (PJ) facilities, guaranteeing that this is not due to the creator’s lack of commitment of Football Leaks and calling for court intervention to expedite the situation.
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“There is a very large delay in the PJ, in the indexing capacity. I fear that the foreseen period will not be fulfilled. the court directly inquires with the PJ regarding how this analysis is going”, said the representative of the main defendant in this case.
Subsequently, the president of the collective of judges, Margarida Alves, determined “that the PJ be officiated in order to be given information for when the consultation of the aforementioned computer device is expected to be concluded”.
Outside the courthouse, after the end of this session, Francisco Teixeira da Mota assured that there was “no censure to be made” of the PJ’s behavior in this area: “I am not censuring the PJ at all. PJ has always, throughout all this time, collaborated intensely in the progress of the process”.
The rest of the morning was filled by the confrontation between the two PJ inspectors who were inside the A5 service station, in Oeiras, on October 22, 2015, to carry out the surveillance operation of the meeting between the then CEO of Doyen, Nélio Lucas, the lawyer and collaborator Pedro Henriques and Aníbal Pinto, the other defendant in this case, who was representing Rui Pinto.
After the contradictions between the previous testimonies of Aida Freitas and Hugo Monteiro and the first witness having assumed that he had signed the External Diligence Report (RDE) without reading it – a certificate was extracted by the court and later constituted an accused in another case -, the court again confronted the inspectors to understand the circumstances around the meeting, which supports the charge of the crime of attempted extortion.
Inspector Aida Freitas began by delivering documents to the group of judges that, in her view, proved that it was inspector José Amador – coordinator of the investigation – who wrote the RDE without having been inside the service station, only on the basis of in the reports. She also noted that two RDEs had been sent to her, stressing that “two pieces cannot be made for the same operation” and that she maintained that she had not heard the conversation.
The judges repeatedly questioned the two inspectors, both from the formal point of view of the authorship of the RDE, and from the point of view of the content, with Hugo Monteiro revealing that, when he said before that he had prepared the document, he did so on the basis of the transmission of the facts of the diligence to the coordinating inspector José Amador.
“I was the one who transmitted it. After I finished, I confess that I don’t know if I talked to Aida about the operation. When I say that I prepare an RDE, I mean the content”, he said, continuing: “The person who wrote it was Inspector José Amador”.
Aníbal Pinto’s defense then requested that inspector Hugo Monteiro be interrogated again, but the court relegated “the consideration” of this request to “an opportune moment”.
Rui Pinto, 33, 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 PLMJ law firm, the Portuguese Federation of Football (FPF) and the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), and also for computer sabotage of Sporting’s SAD and for extortion, in the attempted form. This last crime concerns Doyen and was what also led to the indictment of lawyer Aníbal Pinto.
The creator of Football Leaks has been free since August 7, 2020, “due to his collaboration” with the Judiciary Police (PJ) and his “critical sense”, but is, for security reasons, included in the witness protection in an undisclosed location and under police protection.
