Rui Pinto, the Robin Hood of soccer, acknowledges having extorted with Football Leaks

The case known as ‘Football Leaks’ has been in court for some time. The publication as a result of obtaining information about players’ contracts without authorisation is currently being tried.

This week, the main defendant, a Portuguese citizen called Rui Pinto, admitted to having extorted money from Nelio Lucas, then CEO of Doyen Sport, back in October 2015.

There are 90 different cases with 89 of them relating to theft of information

“I was never aware that it could constitute a crime of extortion,” Pinto said.

“I recognise that my conduct could be framed as extortion in the form of attempted extortion. Everyone was in this mess, but no one realised what they were doing”.

The self-styled computer hacker claimed that, days after the birth of Football Leaks’, he approached Nelio Lucas, introducing himself as Artem Lubozov using a Russian email address.

Regret

“Today I don’t recognise myself with this, it’s a huge mess,” Pinto continued.

“The whole thing was childish. I imagined that Nelio Lucas would not respond”.

The lawyer Anibal Pinto was the next individual to appear as the legal representation of the aforementioned Pinto. The objective was to arrange a meeting with Lucas outside Portugal and with his identity protected. One of the meetings took place on a service road in Portugal near Oeiras.

Pinto, meanwhile, was in contact from Hungary. He continues to consider everything with information of public interest because of the transfers received by Doyen Capital, whose headquarters are in London with a presence in Malta.

A gruesome story

In a separate trial, Pinto elaborated on where he drew up his scheme.

“I was in Prague with friends who were going to be part of Football Leaks,” Pinto explained.

“We drank and talked about football, about the FIFA corruption case and also about the set-ups related to footballers’ sporting rights in the hands of third parties and investment funds. We knew it was illegitimate.

“The first reports were not even mine, but I was getting the information and I saw the dubious practices of the funds.”

Pinto, 33, a hacker by ‘profession’ is on trial for extortion by asking Nelio Lucas for between 500,000 and one million euros, in addition to the theft of information.

“As I saw that they were of interest, I made them public. Never for money,” Pinto stated.