Rui Pinto faces court: hero or villain?

The trial in Portugal against Rui Pinto, the man behind the whistleblower platform Football Leaks, is scheduled to begin this Friday

Rui Pinto is getting ready for his day in court, with his trial starting this Friday. He faces several charges including unauthorised access to Portuguese data, attempted extortion and violation of the secrecy of correspondence.

Rui Pinto’s lawyers Francisco Teixeira da Mota (pictured left) and his daughter Luísa, along with William Bourdon (pictured right), who was also Edward Snowden’s lawyer, find the number of charges outrageous. They insist on the fact that the extradition order who brought Pinto from Hungary in March 2019 was for just ten charges and now is charged with 90, since the prosecution is bringing one charge for every email account hacked by Rui Pinto.

The whistle-blowing made by Rui Pinto changed the scope of the Football business, revealing a large number of corruption cases, and the consequences of his revelations are still feeding the media. But the people´s perception of Pinto radically changed after it was made public that he was the informant of Luanda Leaks, by using the information he reached by hacking PLMJ emails regarding Isabel dos Santos. This made him a witness in the case against the Angolan mogul, and that’s why he is currently in a witness-protection programme.

Fugitive U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden will be one of the 45 witnesses testifying in Portugal in defence of Rui Pinto.