The French financial crimes prosecution unit the Parquet National Financier (PNF) is seeking to get full access to all the Football Leaks documents in order to pursue its investigation into alleged corruption in professional football. Mediapart and our Portuguese partner Expresso have learnt that the PNF wrote to the Portuguese legal authorities on September 9th announcing that it would soon be sending a formal request for a European investigation order seeking access to the confidential documents obtained by whistleblower Rui Pinto. The French authorities also want to question Pinto, whose documents are behind the Football Leaks revelations and also the Malta Files and Luanda Leaks.
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The email from PNF represents good news for Rui Pinto, who is currently on trial in Lisbon for alleged computer hacking, violation of private correspondence and attempted blackmail in relation to those documents in proceedings that are set to last until December. The 31-year-old former history student from Portugal, who is accused of having obtained the Football Leaks documents illegally, says his aim was simply to expose serious offences, working in collaboration with the press and legal authorities. The request from the PNF backs that argument.
In December 2016 France's PNF became the first prosecution authority in Europe to open a judicial probe after the investigations carried out by Mediapart and our partners in the journalistic consortium European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) based on the Football Leaks documents. The preliminary investigation, into alleged “aggravated money laundering of the proceeds of tax fraud”, relates in particular to the offshore arrangements of former PSG player Javier Pastore which were allegedly used to hide sponsorship income from the tax authorities (see story here).
But the data on the huge Football Leaks files could also be of interest to other French cases, including the preliminary investigation opened by Paris prosecutors in November 2018 into alleged “discrimination based on origins, ethnicity or nationality” and the “collection of personal data by fraudulent, unfair or unlawful means”, following Mediapart's revelations on the ethnic discrimination and profiling carried out by PSG.
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Meanwhile, and at a time when his identity was still secret, Rui Pinto had started to cooperate with the PNF. During a secret meeting in Paris in November 2018 he had handed French prosecutors a sample of 12 million files. Two months later he was arrested in Budapest at the request of the Portuguese legal authorities in relation to the hacking case for which he is today on trial.
Even so, the PNF did not drop the case. Just before Rui Pinto was extradited from Budapest to Portugal, French prosecutors managed to obtain from the Hungarian legal authorities the eight hard drives seized at the whistleblower's home and which contain all the Football Leaks files. However, they are all encrypted. Then, in February 2019, the PNF launched a procedure under the auspices of the European Union agency Eurojust to share the 12 million documents that Rui Pinto had previously supplied with prosecutors in other countries.
In the email sent on September 9th to the Portuguese legal authorities, which Mediapart and Expresso have seen, the PNF prosecutor in charge of the Football Leaks case points out that in February he had already asked for Rui Pinto to be temporarily transferred to France so he could be questioned by the PNF. That request was turned down because of the growing Covid-19 pandemic.
In the meantime the situation in Portugal has changed. Though Portuguese prosecutors are pressing ahead with their case against Rui Pinto, in August they granted him the status of protected witness. In exchange the whistleblower agreed to decipher all the documents on his hard drives. These are now being used by the Portuguese authorities to investigate professional football and also alleged corruption in Angola.
The PNF states in its email that, having read French press articles about the “cooperation” between Rui Pinto and the Portuguese authorities, it intends to send a second European investigation order seeking judicial cooperation between the two countries.
The French prosecution unit will formally ask Portugal to send it the “decryption keys that Rui Pinto” had - according to press reports - given them, in order to “allow the PNF to progress in its own investigations based on the same electronic data”. The PNF also wants to be able to “question Rui Pinto (whether in Portugal or in a video link from France) in order to better understand the contents of the data”.
In conclusion the PNF asks the Portuguese legal authorities if they foresee any “obstacle to the fulfilment of such a request” and, more particularly, if it is possible to question Rui Pinto while his trial is taking place.
When contacted by Mediapart about the email to the Portuguese authorities, the PNF said that it was “not in a position to confirm this information”.
The request for a European investigation order will put pressure on Portugal. Given their cooperation with Rui Pinto it will be hard for the legal authorities there to justify rejecting the appeal from France. Indeed, France is not the only country interested in the case. Representatives of nine nations attended the Eurojust meeting on Football Leaks, and Belgian and Swiss prosecutors have already expressed an interest in getting hold of the data.
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If you have information of public interest you would like to pass on to Mediapart for investigation you can contact us at this email address: enquete@mediapart.fr. If you wish to send us documents for our scrutiny via our highly secure platform please go to https://www.frenchleaks.fr/ which is presented in both English and French.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter