Rui Pinto, the whistleblower whose leaks of private documents prompted first Uefa and then the Premier League to investigate Manchester City’s financial affairs, has lost his protected witness status in Portugal. The Portuguese authorities confirmed the decision less than two hours after Pinto had used social media to turn his attention on the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino — the latest in a series of interventions since City’s guilty verdict from an independent Premier League commission.
The move is understood to have taken the 37-year-old by surprise and leaves him without a job, a home or an income. Pinto has been a protected witness since 2020, when he granted Portuguese authorities access to millions of files acquired before his arrest in Budapest, where he had moved after a year in the Hungarian capital as an Erasmus student. He has been living in a safe house under protection ever since and has never disclosed his location, and it is understood he has received no visitors.
Talks had been initiated to begin the process of reintegrating Pinto back into social and professional life. Those talks will now be halted, leaving him to fend for himself. He has been advised not to return home, not to contact family members, and not to visit crowded places either socially or for work.
More than a decade has passed since Pinto set up the Football Leaks website in a crusade triggered by the Fifa scandal in 2015. A former history student with trademark spiky hair, who used to make extra cash selling books about the second world war, he has become a cause célèbre who divides opinion in his homeland and has been compared to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
Since City’s guilty verdict he has not held back on social media. His first targets were what he alleged were the club’s “cheating” executives, accused by Pinto of demonstrating “a complete lack of respect for the rules”. On Wednesday he turned his attention to Infantino.
The Premier League’s case against City drew heavily on evidence provided by Football Leaks, including an internal memo from the club’s chief executive, Ferran Soriano, in which he wrote: “We will need to fight this and do it in a way that is not visible, or we will be pointed out as the global enemies of football.” City continue to protest their innocence, and Soriano said this week that the club would appeal on the basis that the commission’s verdict “contains clear, material errors of law, principle and fact and that it is unsafe”.
The question of whether such evidence should be used provoked huge public debate in Portugal. The Premier League’s regulations stipulate that any investigation “shall not be bound by judicial rules governing the admissibility of evidence. Instead, facts relating to a breach of these rules may be established by any reliable means.” That tallies with Pinto’s own position. In 2019 he said it was “nonsense” to claim the data he provided was tainted because it had been obtained illegally. “The documents are authentic,” he said. “That is what matters. This and the content. I don’t consider myself as a hacker, but as a citizen who acted in the public interest. My sole intention was to reveal illicit practices that affect the world of football.”
His own legal record is mixed. Pinto wore a bulletproof vest during his first trial in 2020 and entered through a dedicated entrance guarded by special forces; those attending were searched three times and barred from bringing mobile phones or computers into the courtroom, while snipers were positioned on buildings near the courthouse at the start of the trial. He was given a suspended four-year sentence in September 2023 after being found guilty on counts of attempted extortion, illegal access to data and breach of correspondence. He has always insisted he never received money, but has admitted regret over asking Doyen Sports Investments for money after obtaining thousands of the agency’s internal emails. “I told myself: ‘If I allow them to buy me out now, I am no better than this whole business.’ So, I wrote to Doyen and told them to keep their money. Not a single cent was paid,” he told Der Spiegel in 2019. “What I did was very naive. Looking back now, I regret it. But I repeat that I deny having committed any criminal offence.” The judge found that defence “not credible”, saying Pinto and his co-defendant, the lawyer Aníbal Pinto, were “well aware of the illegality of their conduct”. In April he was acquitted in a second trial of 241 counts of illegally accessing email accounts belonging to several Portuguese sports bodies, including Benfica, as well as to law firms, magistrates and the tax authority.
Pinto began living in a safe house after being sentenced. He lost his mother to cancer when he was 11 and is permitted to communicate with his father occasionally. Even during his relationship with the actor Mikaela Lupu — whom he said he had met over “a glass of wine and a book” when announcing last year that they had split — the security of the property was never compromised. For six years he has been seen in public only twice: once at a supermarket in Lisbon, accompanied by police officers and wearing a cap and sunglasses, and once when he was assaulted in an altercation believed to have been sparked for football-related reasons. It is understood he was left with a bruised eyebrow and that the police were informed, although no complaint was filed.
The decision to end his witness protection has raised concerns for his welfare, and Pinto is understood to fear for his safety. A bounty was reportedly placed on his head after the revelations made by Football Leaks and by Luanda Leaks, which exposed the inner workings of the business empire of Africa’s richest woman, Isabel dos Santos. She denied corruption allegations.
Requests for clarification from the commission for special security programmes (CPES) — a Portuguese body under the ministry of justice responsible for managing special witness protection programmes — as to why Pinto is no longer a protected witness went unanswered. There has been speculation that the move could be a response to Pinto being accused of hacking the computer systems of PLMJ, the Portuguese law firm founded by José Miguel Júdice. Júdice testified against Pinto during the Football Leaks trial, describing the episode as a theft that had caused him significant moral and psychological distress. He is the father of Rita Alarcão Júdice, Portugal’s minister of justice since June 2025. None of the evidence Pinto has provided to the Portuguese authorities has resulted in any charges.