Rui Pinto follows Manchester City case from witness protection, BBC reports

Football Leaks founder Rui Pinto has been monitoring the Premier League's case against Manchester City while living under witness protection, according to a BBC Sport investigation. The report, published on 26 September, examined the Portuguese hacker's role in exposing confidential football documents and the legal consequences he has faced over obtaining information.

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BBC journalists said discussions with Pinto's legal team established that he had followed the City proceedings since the Premier League brought charges in February 2023. His lawyer, Francisco Texeira da Mota, told the broadcaster that seeing consequences from the disclosures would matter to his client, given the restrictions under which he was living. That was the lawyer's assessment, not a statement from Pinto himself.

Pinto established Football Leaks in 2015. Its disclosures initially included information about Portuguese clubs before extending to prominent players, agents and teams elsewhere in Europe. Confidential Manchester City material included internal correspondence concerning sponsorship agreements and payments. BBC Sport linked those disclosures to the financial investigation, revisiting their origins after reporting that City had been found guilty on most counts.

The material also became a major undertaking for investigative journalists. Pinto shared tens of millions of documents with Der Spiegel journalist Rafael Buschmann, and more than three terabytes of information went to the magazine and other members of the European Investigative Collaborations consortium. Der Spiegel data journalist Christoph Winterbach told the BBC that authentication, cross-checking and establishing public interest were essential before publication.

Pinto's own legal record remains distinct from the investigations prompted by the leaks. Arrested in Hungary in 2019 and extradited to Portugal, he received a four-year suspended sentence there in 2023 for offences including attempted extortion, illegal data access and breach of correspondence. A separate French trial later resulted in a six-month suspended prison sentence, according to the BBC report.

The broadcaster also attended proceedings in Lisbon, where Pinto was accompanied by witness protection personnel and declined to give his address for security reasons. His treatment remains contested: former European Parliament member Ana Gomes argued that he deserved whistleblower protection, while Benfica's lawyer Rui Patricio maintained that the methods used to acquire the information were criminal.