The decision of the emails process, brought by Benfica against the communication director of FC Porto, Francisco J. Marques, the content director of the club’s channel, Diogo Faria, and the former director of Porto Canal, Júlio Magalhães, was postponed to 12 May. The court requested a change in the legal classification of crimes for Francisco J. Marques and Diogo Faria, and postponed the reading of the sentence, which involved the aggravation of the crimes of violation of telecommunications correspondence and the combination of the practice of offending a legal person in co-authorship regime linked to the book The Incarnate Octopus.
The three defendants are accused of crimes of violation of correspondence, communications or telecommunications, with Francisco J. Marques and Diogo Faria also adding crimes of improper access. Similar to the strategy used in the civil case on the same issue – in which FC Porto was ordered to compensate Benfica for 1.6 million euros – the “blue and white” defense emphasizes the public interest of the revelations, claiming that they served to expose acts worthy of criminal censure.
In the final allegations, the prosecutor of the Public Ministry (MP), Ana Pais, asked for the condemnation of the director of communication of FC Porto, for three crimes of violation of non-consensual correspondence, but left the penalty “to the consideration of the court”, given “ the absence of a criminal record” of the defendant.
With regard to Diogo Faria, the prosecutor considered that he had helped Francisco J. Marques, but defended that “the court will qualify the facts”.
The representative of the MP left “to the consideration of the court” a possible conviction of Júlio Magalhães, defending that he “never had direct participation in the direct content in the program, never had prior knowledge of the emails and did not participate in their selection”.
Benfica’s lawyers, as well as the agents of Luís Filipe Vieira, president of Benfica at the time of the facts, and Carlos Deus Pereira, former president of the General Assembly of the Portuguese Professional Football League – both assistants in the process – ask for the conviction of the defendants.
What case is this?
At the heart of the process are the complaints made systematically by the director of communication at FC Porto, through the Porto Canal, which reported an alleged attempt by Benfica to influence the rankings of referees, based on a complex network of contacts.
The emails that were released on June 6, 2017 revealed a conversation between Adão Mendes, former referee of the Football Association of Braga, and Pedro Guerra, director of content at Benfica TV and commentator for TVI. For Francisco J. Marques, the emails proved the existence of an alleged “corruption scheme [na arbitragem] to benefit Benfica”.
The revelations continued until February 2018, with Benfica filing several lawsuits against the “dragons”, even threatening, at a later stage, to prosecute anyone who downloaded the emails, meanwhile shared on the Internet by an anonymous person – who the Public Ministry says, in the context of the process Football Leaksto have been Rui Pinto.
Francisco J. Marques alleges that the emails arrived anonymously and that, to this day, he does not know who sent them. The “dragons” even had a restricted access room in which information was selected before being presented. In the civil case judged in the city of Porto, Diogo Faria and Francisco J. Marques stated that this process was based on journalistic standards guided by the public interest.
Following the decision of the Court of Appeal regarding this civil procedure, FC Porto will have to pay Benfica 200 thousand euros for each email that is revealed or transferred. With Lusa
