A Portuguese man arrested in Hungary on suspicion of extortion and secrecy violations hacked soccer bodies’ documents — which later appeared on the Football Leaks Web site — because he was “outraged” by criminality in the sport, his lawyers said.
The man, named by his lawyers as 30-year-old Rui Pinto, was detained in Hungary on Wednesday on a European arrest warrant filed by Portuguese police who want to extradite him.
The lawyers said that Pinto would remain under house arrest in Hungary until a decision on his extradition has been made.
Portuguese police said that a national had been detained on Wednesday on a European arrest warrant. The individual was suspected of qualified extortion, violation of secrecy and illegally accessing information, the police said.
German magazine Der Spiegel, which shared access to the documents with more than a dozen other media outlets in cooperation with the European Investigative Collaborations reporting project, said that the material came from a source who identified himself as a Portuguese man named “John.”
Reuters could not determine if Pinto was the source mentioned by Der Spiegel.
His lawyers, William Bourdon and Francisco Teixeira da Mota, said in a statement to the media that Pinto was not a criminal.
He “was outraged with practices in the sport, which he believes do not dignify the players and damage their image,” they wrote.
Pinto became an “important European whistle-blower for Football Leaks” and his revelations have “enabled numerous European judicial authorities to gain knowledge of criminal practices in the world of football,” they said.
According to Pinto’s lawyers, Doyen Sports, a Malta-based investment company providing funds to soccer clubs, filed a criminal complaint against Pinto in Portugal in 2015. The lawyers declined to give details of the complaint, which Reuters has not viewed.
A Doyen spokesperson said it had initially contacted the Portuguese police in 2015 after receiving an e-mail from an “unknown user” who threatened to leak confidential documents, including players’ contracts, unless the company paid a “generous donation.”
The spokesperson said that the case had been on hold until e-mails from Benfica were leaked in 2017, prompting Portuguese police to act.
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