Football Leaks hacker Rui Pinto acquitted of 241 counts in second Portuguese trial

Rui Pinto, the hacker behind the Football Leaks revelations that exposed dodgy dealings in world football, was acquitted on Wednesday of all charges in a second Portuguese trial, despite having previously been convicted for similar offences.

The 37-year-old had been on trial since January 2025 over 241 alleged counts of illegally accessing email accounts belonging to several Portuguese sports bodies, including football club Benfica, law firms, magistrates and the tax authority.

The case was dismissed after the court ruled that the charges were “invalid”, as it pertained to a case for which Pinto had already been tried and convicted in September 2023.

At the time he was handed a four-year suspended prison sentence for a series of cybercrimes, as well as attempted extortion targeting a sports investment fund.

“The prosecution violated the rights of the defendant,” who was subjected to “procedural violence”, the court said in its ruling, quoted by several local media outlets.

Pinto has held the dual status of defendant and protected witness in Portugal and cooperated with investigators in other European countries, including France.

At his first trial, he admitted using illegal means to obtain millions of documents, which he began publishing online in late 2015. Between 2015 and 2018, Pinto shared 18.6m documents on the internet and with a consortium of European newspapers, which published details of the revelations that shook the football world.

The leaks revealed the salaries of Lionel Messi and Neymar. They also brought global attention to a rape allegation lawsuit involving Cristiano Ronaldo, which was later dismissed by a US judge.

Pinto was arrested in January 2019 by Hungarian police in Budapest, where he was living as Portuguese officials sought his extradition. He spent more than a year in pre-trial detention before agreeing to cooperate with authorities in other cases, granting them access to encrypted data.

In 2023, he was given a six-month suspended prison sentence in France for hacking the emails of Paris Saint-Germain executives. He is also behind the “Luanda Leaks”, an investigation published in 2020 about Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of former Angola president José Eduardo dos Santos, who ruled for 38 years.