Rui Pinto, the whistleblower behind the Football Leaks revelations which have shaken the world of professional football, notably providing evidence of corruption and tax evasion on a grand scale, has slammed the prosecution services in his native Portugal, where he has now spent more than six months in preventive detention and stands accused of a total of 147 offences, for ignoring evidence of corruption he previously submitted to them and for making him “a sort of political prisoner”.
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Pinto, 30, was extradited six months ago from Hungary, where he had set up home, after the Portuguese authorities issued an international warrant for his arrest for suspected “extortion, violation of secrecy and illegally accessing information”. The alleged crimes, all linked to the hacking of confidential documents, concern information accessed from entities within Portugal, where his preventive detention has now been prolonged for a further three months.
On top of privacy violations, Pinto is also accused of attempting extorsion – in blunter terms, demanding payment to keep his information secret – which he firmly denies.
In a recently published a statement on Twitter, which his lawyers have confirmed to Mediapart is authentic, Pinto has denounced his arrest as an attempt by the Portuguese public prosecution services to protect “those who practice corruption and tax evasion”, adding that information he submitted to the prosecutors, prior to his arrest, of corrupt practices within professional football in Portugal was ignored.
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Pinto set up the Football Leaks digital platform in 2015, and in 2016 provided 3.4 terabytes of data, which was made up of more than 70 million documents including internal reports and emails, to German weekly Der Spiegel, which the news magazine shared with Mediapart and its other partners in the journalistic network European Investigative Collaborations (EIC). The leaked documents were analysed by the EIC member media which carried out further investigations, leading to the publication, beginning in December 2016, of a total of more than 800 reports by EIC members, including Mediapart, revealing the secret dark side of the football business in Europe, exposing fraud and tax evasion, political corruption, the use of prostitution networks, match fixing and the exploitation of under-age players.
The information provided by Pinto, whose identity was initially protected by Der Spiegel behind the alias of "John", and the subsequent investigations by the EIC has led to the prosecution of a number of individuals, notably for tax fraud in Spain. Before his arrest in Hungary, Pinto had begun collaborating with the French public prosecution services’ financial crime branch, the PNF, and had also earlier offered information to the Portuguese authorities.
After Portuguese prosecutors announced, in a 195-page legal document presented on September 19th, that he faced charges for a total of 147 offences, Pinto’s lawyers, William Bourdon and Francisco Teixeira da Mota, released a joint statement denouncing what they described as an attempt to “gag and destroy” the whistleblower and to prevent him from cooperating with formal investigations in other countries.
In his Twitter message published in Portuguese on September 25th, Pinto said he had become “a sort of political prisoner” who the Portuguese prosecutors were trying to “reduce to silence” by banning him from any contact with journalists.
Several requests to interview Pinto, submitted by EIC partner Der Spiegel, have been refused. The EIC has been told that a diary kept by Pinto during his detention has been confiscated.
In his Twitter statement, Pinto accused the Portuguese prosecutors of “protecting those who practice corruption and tax evasion”. He said that in 2017 and 2018 he had submitted several detailed reports of corrupt practices in Portuguese football to the Lisbon public prosecution services, via a dedicated online platform created by their Central Department of Criminal Investigation and Prosecution (CDCIP), a body which officially describes itself as being entrusted with investigating “violent, highly organised or particularly complex crime”.
But, continued Pinto, despite this “there has been no investigation opened into the criminal practices revealed by Football Leaks”. He said the Portuguese public prosecutor in charge of the case against him, Patrícia Barão, “has very clearly indicated that she wanted to cooperate with me uniquely in a logic of auto-incrimination, and not to investigate offences committed by others”.
His prosecution, wrote Pinto, was a “threat to the balance of democracy and the rule of law in Portugal” where, he added, the prosecution services decide arbitrarily “who is the subject of prosecution, or not”, and that he had become “a target” to bring down because he had dared to denounce corruption. “Fortunately, I will have an ideal stand at the trial to speak of a large part of what I know,” he added, with reference to what appears as his probable future trial. His damning statement published on Twitter followed immediately after the decision to prolong his preventive detention, which until now has been in an isolated cell in a police station in Lisbon, by a further three months.
The precise terms of the prosecution case against him, notably the charges that may be brought to trial, are yet to be determined.
Writing on her Mediapart blog on Monday (in French, here), Eva Joly, a former prominent French judge and investigating magistrate, leant support to Pinto and accused the Portuguese authorities of doing “nothing” to investigate the evidence of corruption in professional football that he had helped to reveal.
Joly, 75, who has joint French-Norwegian nationality, came to prominence in France as a leading figure in the fight against corruption following her investigations, as a magistrate, into the so-called “Elf affair”, involving a vast sleaze scandal at the then state-owned oil corporation Elf (now Total) which concluded in a trial in 2003. She later became an advisor on anti-corruption policies to the Norwegian government and, in 2009, was appointed as an advisor to the Icelandic government in investigations into the possible responsibility of criminal practices in the country’s banking collapse. In France’s 2012 presidential elections, she ran as candidate for the EELV Green party, when she garnered 2.3% of votes cast.
She remains an outspoken anti-corruption campaigner, and in her blog post published on Mediapart on Monday she called on the Portuguese authorities to reform its justice laws. “The Portuguese authorities consider that they cannot use the Football Leaks revelations given that this information [divulged by the platform] was obtained illegally,” she wrote. “The time has come for Portugal to consider that, when a judicial framework is not adapted for the fight against corruption, the laws must evolve.” Otherwise, she said, Portugal’s legal system would be regarded as one which “protects the powerful and the corrupt, and which imprisons those who speak out”.
She concluded: “Political representatives and citizens, it’s up to you now to play your part.”
Pinto’s legal team have said the case against him contains “numerous elements that are false and steeped in illegality”. Under Portuguese law, they must submit their challenges to the accusations by October 12th, after which a magistrate will rule on whether Pinto should be sent for trial.
Following the September 19th indictment, and the subsequent three-month prolongation of Pinto’s preventive detention, his French lawyer William Bourdon wrote to the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, David Kaye, seeking his support for the Portuguese whistleblower. In that letter, Bourdon wrote that Pinto was “artificially and unjustly criminalised by the judicial authorities of his country while those who should answer for financial crimes as revealed by Football Leaks are wrongly protected”.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse