The Portuguese hacker Rui Pinto behind the "Football Leaks" and the recent "Luanda Leaks", and who claims to have gathered many other documents, should be supported and not prosecuted by the Portuguese authorities, said on Friday 14 February lawyers.
Rui Pinto is in pre-trial detention in Portugal, where he is awaiting trial for attempted extortion and computer crimes linked to the leaks of the “ Football Leaks ”. He also claimed to be the source of the leak of 715,000 compromising documents for the Angolan billionaire Isabel dos Santos.
Compared by his lawyer to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange
"He is not an offender, he is a great whistleblower like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden and he must be protected by the Portuguese authorities (...), there is no other in Europe whistleblower who suffers the fate of Rui Pinto, "said his French lawyer William Bourdon, during a press conference on the protection of whistleblowers organized in Lisbon.
Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange is currently in prison in Britain, where he is fighting his extradition to the United States.
Edward Snowden is an American computer scientist accused in the United States of spying and stealing documents for having revealed an American program of mass surveillance of states. He received asylum in Russia.
The man behind the Luanda leaks
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published in January a large investigation, called " Luanda Leaks ", accusing the daughter of the former Angolan president of having " siphoned the Angolan economy " and accumulated fraudulently a fortune estimated at 2.1 billion dollars (1.8 billion euros). Rui Pinto's lawyers claimed that he was behind the documents that fueled this investigation.
" He has always shown the same desire to fight corruption and money laundering and we reiterate here his wish to cooperate with the Portuguese and European authorities ," added his Portuguese lawyer Francisco Teixeira da Mota.
Read also: Dos Santos affair: a Portuguese banker quoted in the "Luanda Leaks" found dead
Shortly after his arrest, at the request of the Portuguese authorities, in January 2019 in Budapest, where he resided, the hacker, now 31, said he was in possession of six terabytes of unpublished documents.
Through William Bourdon, Rui Pinto had engaged in collaboration with the French National Financial Prosecutor's Office at the end of 2018, who had estimated that the hacker had allowed " major developments " in the investigations for tax fraud that he opened. " Rui Pinto was never motivated by money, his revelations are made in the general interest and will make it possible to recover hundreds of millions of euros (...). The charges against him are false and we will succeed in dismantling them, ”assured Mr. Bourdon.
Several European authorities, including France and Belgium, wish to meet Rui Pinto again with the aim of advancing their investigations. The revelations of " Football Leaks ", which led to the opening of legal proceedings also in Belgium and Switzerland, remain to this day the most important leak of information behind the scenes of the football.
