Rui Pinto, the Hacker Who Exposed Man City's Finances, Loses Witness Protection Days After Guilty Verdict

Since Manchester City were found guilty on September 29 of all 115 Premier League charges tied to the Football Leaks documents, the man who exposed them has lost the protection that kept him alive.

Rui Pinto, the 37-year-old founder of Football Leaks, was told Wednesday that the special security program he has been under since August 2020 ends October 10, according to a statement from his legal team carried by FlashScore, the Guardian, and Malay Mail. He loses his protected, confidential housing and gets no guarantee that police protection continues, his lawyers say.

"It's shocking," Pinto's Portuguese lawyer Francisco Teixeira da Mota told the Telegraph. The decision landed the day after the Premier League's independent commission published its written findings against City, 11 years almost to the day after Football Leaks first went public in 2015.

What Pinto actually did

Pinto's documents, shared with German magazine Der Spiegel in 2018 and distributed through the European Investigative Collaborations network, formed the backbone of the Premier League's case. The commission found City disguised more than £900 million in funding through sham commercial contracts and false accounting across nine seasons, from 2009-10 through 2017-18, according to the Guardian. City deny all wrongdoing and have confirmed they will appeal.

Pinto didn't come to this clean. He was convicted in Portugal in 2023 of illegal access to data, attempted extortion, and breach of correspondence, drawing a suspended four-year sentence, per the BBC. He wore a bulletproof vest at that trial under heightened security. Earlier this year he was acquitted in a separate trial on 241 counts of illegally accessing sports-body email accounts, including Benfica's. He is, legally speaking, both a convicted hacker and an acquitted defendant and a cooperating state witness, all at once.

The official justification, and the counter

Portuguese police have assessed the threat to Pinto as low risk, according to the Guardian, despite an assault on him in Lisbon in April that left him with a bruised eyebrow. No formal complaint was filed over that assault, the Guardian reported.

That's the government's call. Portuguese authorities are the ones who get to decide when protection ends, and they say the danger has passed. They haven't publicly detailed the basis for that risk reassessment, and Pinto's lawyers say their request to see those details, made in writing to the Ministry of Justice, has gone unanswered.

Pinto's lawyers, Teixeira da Mota and Luisa Teixeira da Mota in Portugal along with William Bourdon and Vincent Brengarth in France, dispute the low-risk conclusion entirely. Their joint statement, quoted by FlashScore, calls the decision "an act of state terrorism" and says Pinto was not given the prior hearing "required by law" before the program was cut. They note his revelations "implicated powerful figures with vast resources," and that legal proceedings stemming from the leaks, including the City case, are still active.

Both things can be true at once. Portuguese police may genuinely believe the acute threat has faded since 2020, and Pinto's team may be right that losing housing and guaranteed police protection just as a landmark verdict against one of the world's richest clubs becomes final is a bad look regardless of the underlying risk math. Neither side's assessment is independently verifiable from the public record here.

What happens next

Pinto's lawyers say they will file an administrative appeal with suspensive effect against the Ministry of Justice's decision, which would, if granted, keep protection in place while the appeal is heard. As of Friday, the ministry had not responded to the lawyers' earlier request to reconsider, according to FlashScore.

Pinto has also been using his remaining visibility to go after FIFA president Gianni Infantino, repeating a 2018 allegation that Infantino, while serving as UEFA general secretary, intervened to help City and Paris Saint-Germain avoid financial fair play sanctions. Infantino has not responded to that specific allegation in these reports, and it remains an unproven claim from a source now facing his own credibility fight over the circumstances of his cooperation.

The protection lapses October 10. Whether Portugal's courts intervene before then is the open question hanging over a man who says he now has to disappear to an undisclosed location indefinitely.