FOOTBALL’S DIRTY WAR EXCLUSIVE FIFA ‘have been using Football Leaks for years’ to probe clubs
Prosecutors from four countries seek help from whistleblower in prison for leaks that rocked English champions
PROSECUTORS from four European countries are seeking information from Football Leaks source Rui Pinto, whose revelations have sparked multiple UEFA inquiries into Manchester City.
Pinto’s lawyers have told The Mail on Sunday that the 30-year-old’s information is being sought by Belgium, Switzerland, France and Germany, though there are fears that significant data will be destroyed if he is successfully extradited to Portugal, where his revelations have embarrassed Ben fi ca and Sporting Lisbon.
One of Europe’s top lawyers in whistleblowing cases, William Bourdon, who has previously represented the national- security whistleblower Edward Snowden, is leading attempts to prevent Hungary agreeing to the extradition. Bourdon told the MoS: ‘I’m surprised not to see more citizens, politicians and the football industry asking why [Pinto] might be extradited and his data destroyed. It is in the long-term interest to put an end to this dirty war which is so harmful to football.’ Publicly, football authorities have disassociated themselves f rom Pinto. UEFA have made no contact with him or hi s l awyers. Sources have indicated UEFA will try to corroborate hi s f i ndings through alternative sources in their i nvestigation against Premier League champions City.
But the MoS has seen details of a request from Belgian prosecutors to their Hungarian colleagues, asking to be able to cite Pinto as a witness in a tax-avoidance case. They also request documents from his computers, which the Hungarians have seized.
Similar requests have been made by the French National Financial Prosecutor’s Office and Munich’s tax investigation office. It is understood that Swiss i nvestigators examining the relationship between FIFA president Gianni Infantino and a Swiss prosecutor, Rinaldo Arnold, have also asked Pinto for information. Eurojust, the Europewide judicial co- operation unit, convened a meeting of prosecutors from 10 countries at The Hague, two weeks ago, to co-ordinate work on the basis of Pinto’s information.
Despite the global significance of Pinto’s Football Leaks data, Portugal’s attempts to extradite him have been relatively low profile. The MoS was the only British newspaper individually represented in the courtroom when the former history student was led in wearing dark blue clothes, shackled by his hands and ankles (left) on Tuesday, to see his l awyers l ose t heir i nit i al attempts to prevent his extradition. An appeal hearing is likely to be heard within ten days.
Pinto was arrested in January and his lawyers believe his parents unwittingly led police to his flat, above a handyman’s shop in a 19th century building off Blaha Lujza Square in Pest, the eastern part of Budapest.
‘We think the parents were followed from the airport,’ said David Deak, Pinto’s Hungarian lawyer. ‘They arrived in the evening. He was arrested the next morning.’
Bourdon compares Pinto to the whistleblower in t he Panama Papers case. ‘Both of them came out of the blue with no link to the industry their revelations were about. For both, it was a form of citizen’s revolt,’ he said.
In court last week, a Hungarian lawyer repeatedly described him as ‘the accused hacker’. She claimed that most of the information he has obtained came via emails to and from Sporting Lisbon and the agency Doyen Sports.
Pinto insisted ‘I’m not a hacker’ several times in English and was ordered to maintain silence. When permitted to speak, he said he had obtained information ‘accidentally’ and that his conscience did not allow him to keep it to himself.
He passed it to German news magazine Der Spiegel, who have released information deemed to be in the public interest.
His lawyers are not optimistic about the appeal which will see him remain in Gyorskocsi prison until next week.
‘Legislation governing the treatment of whistleblowers i s far weaker in Portugal than in other western European countries,’ said Bourdon.
FIFA have been using ‘Football Leaks’ documents as a ‘hugely useful investigative tool’ for years, the Mail on Sunday can reveal, despite being aware they may have been obtained by hacking.
Mark Goddard, who was in charge of FIFA’s Transfer Matching System (TMS) database up to 2017, and was involved in many investigations into clubs, says cleaning up the game justifies using evidence wherever it can be found. He says UEFA should do the same in investigating Manchester City over Financial Fair Play matters.
Rui Pinto is accused of hacking to compile the Leaks, and is appealing extradition to his native Portugal from Hungary on the grounds of being a whistleblower.
Today, Goddard reveals that FIFA did their own checks on the Leaks papers when they began appearing in 2015, and found them authentic and credible. ‘We knew he [Pinto] was getting primary source material, and having verified the quality and veracity of those documents, we were thinking “Jesus! This helps us”.
‘Any particular information [in the Leaks] that would help us in pursuing a particular line of inquiry, we would use that to build a picture, and build a case.
‘[We were saying to clubs] “It’s not like we don’t trust you, we’re just requiring you to prove what you’ve said”.’
He said FIFA would not start disciplinary proceedings based on a Leaks document alone. ‘But we would read the documents and think “Wow” and then go and ask a question.
‘We could ask “Did you guys do blah blah and blah blah?”, and they’d sit there … going “Holy s***! How did you know to ask that?” [We said] it didn’t matter how we knew how to ask that. Just answer the question …
‘You can appreciate how that can put people on the spot pretty quickly … and lead us to work whether there is a case there.’
Goddard, now an independent consultant, pushed for changes at FIFA that aimed to force all clubs to make public all aspects of all transfers. City were among those resistant, he says. He describes them as ‘obfuscatory’ and as an illustration adds: ‘I recently bumped into the TMS compliance lawyer who has been working on the City minors topics [an investigation into alleged rule breaches around hiring foreign youngsters] for FOUR years.’
Asked to clarify whether City had been unhelpful in that process, Goddard says: ‘Oh God yeah! The usual. Obfuscate. Delay. Some clubs make it as hard for you as possible.’