End Game
Football Leaks Source Prepares for His Day in
Court
The trial in Portugal against Rui Pinto is scheduled
to begin next week. The man behind the Football Leaks revelations is now in a
witness protection program after reaching a deal to cooperate with legal
authorities.
Von Rafael
Buschmann, Nicola Naber und Christoph Winterbach
28.08.2020,
14.44 Uhr
Rui Pinto
is wandering past cows and pigs at an isolated spot not far from Lisbon. Two
police officers are following the 31-year-old as he walks with two reporters
from DER SPIEGEL. The man behind the whistleblower platform Football Leaks is
currently in a witness-protection program, which is why there are strict rules
regarding what can be written about his current location. "My life is
still at risk," Pinto says.
Yet he
still appears to be in good spirits. For the first time in a year and a half,
he is a free man. And his chances of getting acquitted in his upcoming trial in
Lisbon have recently risen.
Our walk
together with Pinto outside of Lisbon took place on the day before last
Sunday's Champions League final between Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain,
which was played in the Portuguese capital. It was to be the first of two
interviews. Like no one else before him, Pinto was responsible for shining a
spotlight on the dark side of professional football. Even as the football
industry celebrates the pinnacle of the club season in Benfica Lisbon’s
stadium, Pinto is living just a few kilometers away under police protection in
a safe house.
Pinto has
made numerous influential enemies in recent years. He shared more than 70
million confidential documents - a total of 3.4 terabytes of data – with DER
SPIEGEL and its partners in the journalism consortium European Investigative
Collaborations (EIC). Since 2016, more than a thousand articles have been
written based on that data, some of which had serious legal implications.
Cristiano Ronaldo was handed a suspended sentence for tax evasion and had to
pay around 20 million euros. Some of the most important sports agents in the
world are still being investigated for tax violations and money laundering. The
Football Leaks documents have even created problems for FIFA President Gianni Infantino,
and Swiss public prosecutors are investigating him.
Thus far,
though, only a single person has landed in prison as a result of Football
Leaks. Rui Pinto himself.
He has been
accused of hacking and of attempted extortion, with his trial slated to begin
next Friday. Back in December, Pinto discussed his rather bleak prospects in an
interview with DER SPIEGEL, including a possible prison sentence of up to 25
years. But one reason for his improved confidence is a deal he has reached with
the Portuguese judiciary. Pinto has granted access to his greatest treasure: He
opened up eight encrypted hard drives containing 17.5 terabytes of information.
Strict
Security Measures
It's not
easy to meet up with Pinto these days. DER SPIEGEL sent him repeated requests
for an interview over the past several months, but Pinto declined them all
without offering an explanation. He was in house arrest and was not allowed to
tell anyone that he was engaged in negotiations with the judiciary. He may now
officially be free, but he must consult the police each time he wants to go
outside so that the potential risks can be discussed. For his meeting with DER
SPIEGEL, Pinto's guardians have imposed strict security measures. They provided
the address of a holiday apartment, where the meeting on the day of the
Champions League final can take place.
Late in the
evening on the day prior to our first meeting, Pinto sends an address via an
encrypted messenger service. It leads to the parking lot of a supermarket
located far away from Lisbon. "Send me the license plate number of your
rental car," he asks, and names a time for the meeting.
The next
day, a car appears at the parking lot just a few minutes after the agreed to
time. Two men wearing masks roll down their windows, nod briefly indicating
they should be followed. On the drive, they make several sudden turns,
apparently to shake off any potential tails. When the car finally comes to a
stop at a remote rest stop, Pinto opens the door and jumps out of the back
seat. He is wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses and, of course, a mask.
A former
history student who emigrated to Budapest in 2015, Pinto has been accused by
Portuguese prosecutors of hacking into servers and stealing sensitive data from
football clubs, law firms, investigators and sports agencies.
Since the
very beginning of the Football Leaks project, Pinto has insisted that he
doesn't see himself as a hacker. Last December, though, he told DER SPIEGEL,
"I fully accept that, from the standpoint of Portuguese law, some of my
acts may be considered illegal." In his statement of defense submitted to
the court at the beginning of this week, he elaborated on what that might have
meant. Pinto regrets having violated the law in order to access data. He said
he was convinced that the data would help him uncover serious crimes and that
he didn't adequately reflect on the consequences of his activities. "You
can ask me all the questions you want," Pinto says. "But before the
trial, I won't be able to answer everything. The court is the right place to
explain my position."
"Psychological
Torture"
The next
day, Pinto shows up at a secret apartment several hours before the start of the
Champions League final. It is a sparsely furnished room with a double bed, two
recliners and a small television in the basement of a holiday home. Pinto sits
down in one of the easy chairs and looks back on the last year and a half. He
speaks of harassment and "psychological torture" in a Budapest
prison, where he was locked away following his arrest in January 2019. Hungary
extradited him two months later to Portugal, where he was put in solitary
confinement for over half a year.
Pinto is
proud of the fact that he managed to get through that time. "After leaving
isolation, I sometimes had problems concentrating," he says. It felt like
a huge door had opened in front of him, he says, and he had trouble interacting
with groups of people. In April, Pinto was released into house arrest and has
officially been a free man since August 7. A commission made up of judges,
state prosecutors and Justice Ministry officials continue to believe that he is
in danger. Pinto didn't just ruffle the feathers of football stars and clubs,
but also those of state leaders in Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Angola. Still, he says,
"I can sleep pretty well at night." He can live with the risk, he
says, since his main goal was uncovering transgressions.
Pinto
skirts around questions about how he accessed the data. He says his role was
merely that of searching for, collecting and analyzing information pertaining
to violations before passing them along to journalists or criminal
investigators. He doesn't view himself as a hacker, but as a whistleblower.
There is
also another way of looking at it. Pinto’s greatest weakness in court is the
accusation of attempted extortion. It calls into question Pinto’s supposedly
lofty intentions. "I regret specifically one thing: having this contact
with Nélio Lucas," says Pinto. Indeed, it was a legal complaint filed by
sports marketing agency Doyen and its manager Lucas that led to the current
trial. Pinto allegedly hacked the company’s IT systems in 2015. In an email, he
demanded a sum of "between 500,000 euros and 1 million” in exchange for
not publishing the documents. He also contacted a lawyer who then met with
Lucas and his legal adviser at a gas station in Lisbon to discuss the deal.
Police secretly recorded the conversations. DER SPIEGEL and the EIC reported on
these allegations back in 2016.
"I was
naive back then," says Pinto. He says he wanted to test how far Lucas and
Doyen would go to prevent the publication of compromising documents.
"I Did
Everything for the Public"
A few days
ago, the Portuguese daily Público published an article quoting from an email
that could challenge Pinto’s portrayal. The article claims that in the mail, he
suggested to his former lawyer, who is also now facing legal proceedings
himself, that the money being demanded from Doyen could be funneled through tax
havens like Malta or Cyprus. Was Pinto really considering making use of such
opaque channels? This is exactly the same accusation he himself has been making
all this time against the football industry.
"I
will explain in court when deemed necessary," Pinto says. He says he broke
off the negotiations before any money changed hands. As such, Pinto claims he
didn’t commit a crime.
Within the
industry, Doyen had a reputation for being a particularly dubious company. The
sports marketing firm purchased shares in transfer rights from professional
football players and then profited significantly from the later sales of
players. At some point, the setup, known as Third-Party Ownership (TPO) went
too far even for FIFA, and the global football governing body banned the model.
In Malta,
where Doyen Sports is registered, the Financial Services Authority fined the
company for illegal lending. Spanish authorities are investigating Doyen Sports
and Lucas on suspicions of tax evasion based on the publication of Football
Leaks documents. Two other managers have also been accused of money laundering.
Portuguese authorities froze 8 million euros in a Doyen account in spring 2019
because they were concerned about a planned transfer of millions of euros to
the tax haven St. Lucia. An investigation is still ongoing. Lucas and Doyen are
not making any public statements about the allegations.
Officials
have questions about the origins of the billions Doyen has invested in the
football industry. Pinto’s documents suggest that the Doyen network’s capital
came from Kazakh oligarchs who raked in millions in the raw materials sector
after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Tevfik Arif, the father of one of the
former Doyen bosses, engaged in real estate business with Donald Trump. The
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence even highlighted Arif’s contacts
with Russia and Turkey in a report last week, stating: "Information
obtained by the committee suggests he was involved in Russian organized crime,
money laundering and human trafficking dating back to at least 2000.” In
response to a request for comment, a spokeswoman for Arif denied all the allegations.
Football
Leaks exposed how professional football doesn’t care one iota about the sources
of money for salaries, commissions and transfer fees.
A Deal with
the Authorities
Pinto has
now handed this data over to the Portuguese judicial system. The fact that he
is cooperating so extensively with investigators will likely also strengthen
his position in court. But how did a deal take shape?
Pinto says
he has always wanted to work with the Portuguese, but only on the condition
that the documents contained on his hard drives not be used against him. For a
long time, the Public Prosecutor’s Office didn’t want to agree to the deal. But
pressure grew on the investigators. In January, the International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), whose members include Germany’s Süddeutsche
Zeitung newspaper, published the findings of its research into Isabel dos
Santos, the Angolan who is Africa’s richest woman. The "Luanda Leaks”
reporting traced a kleptocratic system of corruption and money laundering in
Angola. The documents came from Rui Pinto. "It's disgusting that Portugal
became the laundromat for Angolan elites,” Pinto says. He claims the rulers
enriched themselves even as the country suffered under extreme poverty.
Dos Santos
denies the allegations. But her system collapsed nonetheless. After previously
calling him a hacker, a pirate or a spy, the Portuguese media suddenly came to
view Pinto as a valuable whistleblower. It also forced the Portuguese
authorities to admit that the data he is holding can be used to uncover
misconduct in many different areas.
The problem
they had was that they couldn’t get to the documents without his help. The hard
drives have passwords that are more than 40 characters long, and each drive had
been encrypted individually. Pinto threatened that dos Santos was only the tip
of the iceberg and that there were still many more irregularities that could be
exposed through his data – also in Portugal.
It appears
to be better for investigators to be working together with Pinto. The director
of the law enforcement agency has even praised Pinto for his help. When asked
if he thinks it is likely he will be sent to jail again, Pinto says, "I
don’t think so.” His defense team is comprised of three lawyers: Portuguese
attorney Francisco Teixeira da Mota and his daughter Luísa and French lawyer
and whistleblower expert William Bourdon. They want to call 45 witnesses,
including American whistleblower Edward Snowden. And they have already had
success with petitions claiming possible bias on the part of two out of three
judges who had been assigned by lottery to the trial. After showing on Facebook
that he’s an avid Benfica Lisbon fan and clicking the "like” button
beneath an article critical of Pinto, the presiding judge who had been selected
for the trial got dismissed from the proceedings as well as the second judge,
who had been represented by one of the current plaintiffs’ lawyers in another
case.
The
interview has already gone on for several hours by the time the Champions
League final begins. Pinto wants to step out and get some fresh air as the
players with Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain walk out onto the pitch.
After he returns, he follows the final pitting the two Qatar-sponsored clubs
against each other with one eye, while at the same time chatting with his
girlfriend. "Football is about the fans, the real atmosphere,” says Pinto,
"not this plastic event atmosphere where money dominates everything.”
He is
slowly turning away from football, the sport for which he took all these risks.
These days, he’s more passionate about issues like investigating corruption,
fraud and tax evasion. Pinto says he used his time in jail to read numerous
investigative exposé books, including ones about the abuse of power by states.
After the
match, Pinto drives off into the darkness with his bodyguards to an undisclosed
location, where he plans to prepare for his trial. He says he’s not concerned
yet with what comes next. "I want to solve my legal situation first,”
Pinto says. "I want to get acquitted.”
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