Rui Pinto acquitted in Portugal after second Football Leaks trial | OneFootball

Portuguese hacker Rui Pinto, the man behind the Football Leaks revelations, was acquitted by a Portuguese court on Wednesday at the end of his second trial.

According to L'Équipe, the 37-year-old had been on trial since January 2025 for 241 alleged illegal accesses to email accounts of sports bodies in Portugal, including Benfica, law firms, magistrates and the tax authority.

Judges ruled the indictment invalid because it covered conduct already judged in September 2023, when he received a four-year suspended sentence for cybercrimes and an attempted extortion targeting a sports investment fund.

The court said prosecutors violated the defence’s rights, amounting to procedural abuse. Pinto has been both a defendant and a protected witness in Portugal. He has also cooperated with investigators in other European countries, including France.

During his first trial he admitted carrying out illegal intrusions to obtain millions of documents, and began publishing them online in late 2015.

Shared with a consortium of European investigative media, the cache exposed questionable practices involving star players, clubs and agents, prompting tax recoveries and judicial inquiries in several countries.

Arrested in January 2019 in Hungary, where he lived, then extradited to Portugal, he spent more than a year in pre-trial detention before agreeing to help authorities unlock encrypted data in his possession.

In late 2023 he accepted a six-month suspended sentence from the French courts for hacking Paris Saint-Germain executives.

Source: L'Équipe