The book “Rui Pinto: the hacker who turned the football world upside down”, available in bookstores today, offers the universal public “an overall picture” about the creator of the Football Leaks electronic platform, author Nuno Tiago Pinto acknowledges.
“What I’m doing is linking all these things that go through club break-ins and some well-known law firms, but also other lesser-known ones, to attacks on the prosecution, courts, the state, corporations, and many other things.” general vision that starts in football, but ultimately goes much further than football,” the journalist and director of the magazine Sabado summarized to the Lusa agency.
Between 2015 and 2019, Rui Pinto was behind the disclosure of confidential football industry documents obtained with illegal access to the emails of sports officials and lawyers and released from the Football Leaks platform.
“What was the purpose? I think only he can clarify. In fact, what Rui Pinto said is that he intended to expose serious crimes. I’m not sure if this was the case, as there is an opening episode that begins with an apparent extortion attempt. This could mean that the original purpose could even be to make money, but that later evolved into something else and actually for this purpose of publicizing a different kind of crime. Now we must not forget that in order for this to happen, huge crimes have been committed, very serious and of a gigantic scale,” he evaluated.
The book is part of a journalistic investigation published by Nuno Tiago Pinto and Eduardo Dâmaso on Saturday, September 9, 2018, which “revealed who was the person suspected of being the author of Football Leaks and behind the case of the theft of e emails from Benfica.”.
“The discussion has been made a lot based on that hero or villain. There are people who think that Rui Pinto is a hero, because he made information public with public interest, but they try to omit, forget about the crimes committed or to attach no importance to it.” . On the other hand, there are people who understand that he is just a criminal, who had no problem breaking into other people’s email boxes to steal information, but they also don’t care what part of the relevant information was disclosed. It’s a very interesting complexity,” he noted.
Aside from the numerous articles circulated in the media, Nuno Tiago Pinto searched through thousands of court documents from domestic and foreign criminal investigations targeting Rui Pinto to trace the path of the main defendant of Football Leaks, who was a resident of Budapest, the capital of Budapest, reconstituted. Hungary, where he was arrested in January 2019.
“From the information I was able to glean from the files found on one of Rui Pinto’s drives, there was access credentials data for the emails of over 1,100 people and entities, in a world universe of 36 countries, mostly European. clarified the gigantic dimension of what has been done,” he admitted.
The book also deals with the detention process, the origins of the Football Leaks and Luanda Leaks cases – involving Isabel dos Santosdaughter of Angola’s former president José Eduardo dos Santos – and new suspicions about Rui Pinto, who was born in Vila Nova de Gaia and ran an online business selling books and antiques with his father in Hungary.
“There are people who, in fact, have done nothing illegal and have had huge problems. On the one hand, knowing that they are victims, or have the idea that others might think that they were the source of the information leak. On the other hand, it was quite complicated. There were people who suffered greatly at work and had to change jobs. That is, they were actions with very high consequences that went beyond the mere disclosure of information, something that is often forgotten “he insisted, Nuno Tiago Pinto.
Rui Pinto, 34, was extradited to Portugal just over four years ago and was held until April 2020 and spent a further three months under house arrest until his release. weekly presentations to the Judicial Police (PJ).
There are 90 crimes at stake: 68 of unauthorized access, 14 of breach of correspondence, six of unlawful access – targeting entities such as the Portuguese Football Federation, Sporting, Doyen, the Attorney General’s Office or the Law Firm PLMJ, besides one from computer sabotage to the SAD of the ‘lions’ and one for attempted extortion.
The collective of judges has scheduled for April 28 the reading of the verdict in the Football Leaks case, the second defendant of which is Aníbal Pinto, Rui Pinto’s lawyer at the time of the facts, who was also pronounced for the crime of extortion of between 500,000 euros million euros, as tried, with the investment fund Doyen, in 2015.
Process transfigured links between journalists and sources
The Football Leaks lawsuit has become a “unique case” in the relationship between journalists and information sources, according to Nuno Tiago Pinto, author of the book “Rui Pinto: the hacker who shook the football world”, which is in bookstores today.
“In the big revelations of confidential data we’ve had over the years, there’s a whistleblower who gets the information while working in an institution and gives it to a group of journalists when he leaves. That is not the case here, because someone who did not work anywhere informed journalistic consortia for years,” the journalist and director of the magazine Sabado compared to Lusa.
Between 2015 and 2019, Rui Pinto was behind the disclosure of confidential football industry documents obtained with illegal access to the emails of sports officials and lawyers and released from the Football Leaks platform.
“In a way you can think and wonder how journalism also served as an incentive to commit crimes. If there was no one to divulge the information, I don’t know if those crimes were committed. I believe my colleagues in the consortium had good intentions and did not know how the information was obtained, but it is necessary to think about how these relationships come about, because in some way journalism may have been instrumentalized in an activity that turned out to be criminal “, he noticed.
Nuno Tiago Pinto traversed thousands of court documents from domestic and foreign criminal investigations targeting Rui Pinto to reconstruct the path of the main Football Leaks defendant, who faces trial but has new suspicions along the way.
“This book is a work of journalism that has taken me four years to collect, research and cross-referencing of information. At the stage of its launch, I know I don’t have all the data in my possession, as there are things that will be revealed as the seized materials are analyzed,” he stressed, taking a “passionless look at the facts “.
Rui Pinto, 34, was extradited to Portugal just over four years ago and was held until April 2020 and spent a further three months under house arrest until his release. weekly presentations to the Judicial Police (PJ).
There are 90 crimes at stake: 68 of unauthorized access, 14 of breach of correspondence, six of unlawful access – targeting entities such as the Portuguese Football Federation, Sporting, Doyen, the Attorney General’s Office or the Law Firm PLMJ, besides one from computer sabotage to the SAD of the ‘lions’ and one for attempted extortion.
The collective of judges has scheduled for April 28 the reading of the verdict in the Football Leaks case, the second defendant of which is Aníbal Pinto, Rui Pinto’s lawyer at the time of the facts, who was also pronounced for the crime of extortion of between 500,000 euros million euros, as tried, with the investment fund Doyen, in 2015.
“For the book itself, the decision of the court is more or less irrelevant, because the trial has produced all the evidence and Rui Pinto’s lawyer has asked for the conviction.. It is true that he asked for a suspended sentence, but admitted that there was no point in asking for an acquittal, since Rui Pinto confessed to a large part of the crimes he was accused of,” recalled Nuno Tiago Pinto.
The journalist is confident that the suspicions surrounding the creator of the electronic platform Football Leaks “will continue for many years”, after an argument was made “in a new trial in Portugal”, while “other cases were preemptively suspended”.
“He is a suspect in a lawsuit that arose in Spain at the same time as Football Leaks, which relies on evidence and has already been obtained by the Portuguese authorities. There was also a European Investigation Order, which is a kind of letter rogatory but more agile and faster , in which the French asked our country for information about its activities, after a complaint from Paris Saint-Germain about computer intrusion,” he explained.
Source: DN
