Rui Pinto, the hacker behind Football Leaks, has been stripped of his witness protection in Portugal, it emerged on Wednesday, days after Manchester City was found guilty of 114 of the 115 Premier League financial charges against it.
Mr. Pinto, 37, was told to “exercise caution with family” and to stay off social media now that he is no longer a protected witness, The Guardian reported. It was not clear why the protection had been withdrawn.
After the verdict, Mr. Pinto wrote on X that it was a “historic decision for English football, and one that comes to crown the work I carried out through Football Leaks,” according to The Athletic.
He had kept a close eye on the case. “An explosive case,” he called it in a post on X in 2024, and he still posts often about his club, Porto, on social media, The Athletic reported — a habit the Portuguese authorities have now told him to curb.
The private documents he obtained, covering 2009 to 2018 and including internal emails about sponsorship deals and payments, sat at the heart of the league’s case. The Premier League said City used “sham” commercial contracts “to artificially inflate the club’s revenues, and reduce its costs, by more than 900 million pounds ($1.2bn),” with the money secretly coming from the club’s Abu Dhabi-based owners.
Judgment on Mr. Pinto has never been unanimous. For some, the BBC wrote, he is “no more than a criminal who stole information with sinister intentions.” For others, and for his own lawyers, he is a whistleblower who deserved protection under European law.
The Portuguese magazine Sábado identified him as the man behind Football Leaks in September 2018. He was arrested in Budapest in January 2019 and extradited to Portugal two months later, where prosecutors charged him with 147 crimes, among them attempted extortion and illegally accessing information.
City maintain their innocence and are expected to lodge an appeal in the coming days, according to The Mirror. The independent commission has yet to set a punishment; relegation, a points deduction and a considerable fine have all been raised as possibilities.