Rui Pinto will no longer be granted witness protection in Portugal. The Portuguese whistleblower, whose work on Football Leaks helped expose documents used in the Premier League’s case against Manchester City, now faces the end of a legal safeguard he has had since August 2020.
Rui Pinto founded Football Leaks in 2015 under the pseudonym "John" and later provided files that helped trigger investigations into Manchester City. Those documents became central to a probe that led the Premier League to allege the club used sham commercial contracts to artificially inflate revenues and reduce costs by more than 900 million pounds ($1.2bn).
Football Leaks files
Between 2016 and 2018, he leaked more than 70 million confidential documents to newspapers in the European Investigative Collaborations consortium. The material revealed the salaries of Lionel Messi and Neymar, and it brought global attention to a rape allegation lawsuit involving Cristiano Ronaldo, later dismissed by a United States judge.
The leaks also fed wider scrutiny of football finances. UEFA launched a separate investigation after the files surfaced, while Manchester City and the Premier League remain tied to a case built around documents Pinto obtained and passed on before his arrest.
Portugal in March
Pinto was arrested in Budapest in January 2019 on a European court order for alleged attempted extortion and cybercrimes. He was extradited to Portugal in March 2019 and remained in pre-trial detention until April 2020, before being given protected-witness status in August 2020 after agreeing to grant Portuguese authorities access to millions of files gathered before his arrest.
His legal record is not limited to whistleblowing. He received a four-year suspended sentence in September 2023 in Portugal, and a French trial in 2023 ended with a six-month suspended sentence for hacking emails of Paris Saint-Germain executives. That split history helps explain why his status has always sat between public-interest disclosure and criminal conviction.
Manchester City faces 115 charges in the Premier League case, and the leaked files remain central to that dispute. Under the league’s account, the contracts at issue ran from 2009 to 2018, the same period highlighted by the material Pinto helped put into circulation. The appeal is expected by Friday, leaving the club’s next move tied to evidence that began with Football Leaks.
