Manchester City Whistleblower Rui Pinto to Keep Police Protection Amid Ongoing Threats

Portuguese national Rui Pinto, whose early work as a hacker focused on matters closer to home with leaks around Portuguese football clubs Benfica and FC Porto, will remain under police protection, Portuguese authorities have confirmed.

Computer hacker Rui Pinto, the man behind the Football Leaks website that helped trigger the Premier League probe into Manchester City’s finances, obtained private documents showing that Manchester City broke league rules from 2009 to 2018. An independent commission found Manchester City guilty of all but one of 115 charges brought against them over breaches of Premier League financial rules.

His witness protection measures, which were due to end on Saturday, October 10, will now remain in effect pending a new decision, the Ministry of Justice said in a statement. A previous resolution was nullified because Rui Pinto had not been “duly informed of the reasons for the decision” and had not had the opportunity to challenge it, the statement added on Friday.

Rui Pinto’s lawyers last week denounced irregularities in the proceedings, highlighting the real threats facing their client, who was assaulted in Lisbon last April. The 37-year-old said he had to move to a secret location “due to the multiple death threats” he had received. Rui Pinto has been a protected witness since 2020 after agreeing to grant Portuguese authorities access to millions of files gathered before his arrest.

Arrested in Hungary, where he was living in January 2019, and extradited to his home country, Portugal, Rui Pinto spent more than a year in pre-trial detention before agreeing to cooperate with authorities by granting them access to the encrypted data in his possession.

Rui Pinto was both a defendant and a protected witness in the Portuguese justice system. He is also cooperating with investigators from other European countries. During his first trial, the former history student and self-taught computer expert admitted hacking computers to obtain millions of documents, which he began publishing online in late 2015.

Passed on to a consortium of European investigative media outlets, this wealth of information exposed questionable practices involving star football players, clubs and agents, subsequently leading to tax adjustments and judicial investigations in several countries. A Portuguese court handed Rui Pinto a suspended four-year sentence in September 2023 after he was found guilty on counts of attempted extortion, illegal access to data and breach of correspondence.