“It was given to understand by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and some lawyers that I did not show sincere repentance. They are wrong. As I explained in my previous statements, my life is topsy-turvy. They were very difficult years. I won’t say that my life is destroyed, I’m still alive. While there is life, there is hope. I had wrong behaviors where I violated the law.”
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“It was given to understand by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and some lawyers that I did not show sincere repentance. They are wrong. As I explained in my previous statements, my life is topsy-turvy. They were very difficult years. I won’t say that my life is destroyed, I’m still alive. While there is life, there is hope. I had wrong behaviors where I violated the law.”
This Monday marked the closure of the trial of the case Foobtball Leaks, two years and four months after it started. The sentence will be known on April 28 at 10 am. In the last opportunity to take the floor, Rui Pinto guaranteed that he regretted having violated the email boxes of the various victims that make up the process, even weighing the positive impacts of the revelations he led. A sentiment that takes on even more weight, he asserts, speaking of the lawyers involved in the case: “Nothing justifies violating lawyers’ mailboxes, speaking now of PLMJ. All lawyers have the right to professional secrecy.”
Exactly four years ago, on January 16, 2019, Rui Pinto was arrested in Budapest. Since then, he says, he has not broken the law again, even when that possibility arose. “I spent more than a year in preventive detention. Even in prison, if I wanted to, I could get a cell phone. I always insisted on saying no”, he recalls.
Moments earlier, Rui Pinto’s lawyer, Francisco Teixeira da Mota, he requested prison sentence with suspended sentence for your client. This is because, although the hacker assumed the existence of illegitimate access to information, the revelations had an overall positive impact on society and allowed the authorities to investigate suspected crimes from football to high finance.
“He is a person who was unequivocally motivated to denounce. It is true that he is an angry person, like all the whistleblowers, for being the only one to pay for the revelations”, began by saying the defense of Rui Pinto.
One of the mitigating factors raised by the lawyer relates to the active collaboration that the main defendant in the case Football Leaks has with the Judiciary Police (PJ). Rui Pinto has been in a witness protection program since April 2020, after agreeing to decrypt the hard drives that contained the millions of documents that led to the revelations of the Football Leaks e Luanda Leaks. Teixeira da Mota recalled the testimony of Luís Neves, director of the PJ, reminding the judges of the importance of the client for the ongoing investigations.
