The head of 'Football Leaks', at the start of his trial: "The crimes that led to the revelations are a source of pride"

Rui Pinto, before the start of the trial, this Friday in Lisbon.PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP

David versus Goliath or a simple snooper and extortioner?

This Friday, the trial against the Portuguese Rui Pinto, a 31-year-old former antique dealer, with no professional computer training, responsible for the leak of millions of documents that have exposed corruption in the world of football and soccer, began in Lisbon. empire of the Angolan businesswoman Isabel dos Santos.

The Portuguese justice accuses him of 90 crimes, including attempted extortion and violation of correspondence.

"My work of collecting and analyzing documentaries contributes to increasing freedom of expression," Pinto declared in court, "I hope to continue doing so in the future."

And he added: "The crimes that led to the disclosures are a source of pride, not shame."

Pinto, responsible for the so-called

and

, awakens the most agitated passions in Portugal.

For some he is a kind of vigilante who betrays the corrupt - what the Anglo-Saxons call a

, a whistleblower.

For others he is nothing more than a hacker fan of FC Porto who wanted to harm his archrival, Benfica, and incidentally take a little money.

"I am not a

, I am a

" he assured at the beginning of his trial.

On the way from his arrest in early 2019 in Budapest, where he arrived in 2013 as an Erasmus student and where he lived for several periods until his extradition to Lisbon, the Portuguese shocked

critics by

also exposing in January this year how the Dos Santos empire, a powerful businesswoman daughter of the former president of Angola José Eduardo dos Santos, handled from Portugal an alleged money laundering scheme from corruption in the African country.

The complaints about another corrupt plot that involves the Angolan subsidiary of the old Portuguese bank Espírito Santo, the financial backbone of the Iberian country until its resounding fall in 2014, as well as the fact that it decrypted the discs that were seized during its capture, they were able to be granted parole last month after a year and a half in custody.

The Portuguese authorities also initiated the procedures for him to enter the witness protection program and at the moment he lives in a secret house paid for by the State due to the death threats he has received from abroad.

This Friday the security measures in the court have been extreme.

No one would suspect from seeing him with his beardless face with rosy cheeks and spiky hair in the fashion of the nineties that this man with the appearance of a high school student will be tried for ninety crimes.

At the origin of the case against him is a complaint from the investment fund Doyen Sports Investments, with Kazakh capital and with headquarters in Malta and the United Kingdom, which accuses him of an extortion attempt in 2015 for a sum of between 500,000 and one million euros in exchange for stopping the publication of compromising information about the company.

Pinto claims that he even considered working for Doyen and stopping the leaks, but denies that it was an extortion attempt.

"I was naive at the time and I'm glad I backed off in time," he noted last month in an interview with German magazine

The information that the Portuguese has revealed since 2015, first through the

portal

and later through

and an international media alliance, has served to convict several players in Spain of tax evasion, including Lionel Messi, Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo.

Regarding the latter, paradoxically one of Pinto's great idols, a scandal was also uncovered due to a complaint of sexual abuse in Las Vegas.

Football Leaks is also a source of evidence of the tricks of Manchester City, owned by Emirati Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and Paris Saint-Germain, of the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, to evade financial fair play, designed to close the gap that It was beginning to open up in Europe between traditional teams and those financed by states and foreign billionaires.

In Portugal, Pinto earned the scorn of half the country by giving information about Benfica's corruption to members of Porto, who made it public.

One in two Portuguese fans is a supporter of the Lisbon club, according to a poll last year, and the influence of the team is such that there have been situations as unlikely as a judge declaring himself impeded in the case of Pinto for being a Benfiquista.

One of the arguments of the defendant's defense is that he never went after the information related to Benfica, but rather came to it by following the trail of Isabel dos Santos.

In both cases, the same law firm was involved.

Porto has also been the subject of leaks, such as one in which it was discovered that the son of the club president had received a commission of 700,000 euros for the loan of Casemiro, from Real Madrid.

French lawyer William Bourdon heads the Portuguese legal team.

He is one of the founders of a whistleblower defense NGO in Africa and has represented Edward Snowden, responsible for a large leak of US intelligence documents between 2013 and 2015 fugitive in Russia, who has been cited as one of 45 witnesses of process.

"I hope to be acquitted, because I am a whistleblower and I acted in good faith," Pinto told

.

"I acted in the public interest, to show what was wrong, not just in football."