Football Leaks whistleblower Rui Pinto has been handed a six-month suspended prison sentence after admitting to hacking into the mailboxes of senior executives at Paris Saint-Germain - and he must pay the Ligue 1 giants €1 in damages.
Pinto, who was sentenced at the Paris judicial court on Wednesday morning, admitted to fraudulently accessing the mailboxes of the financial director of PSG, the director deputy general and an assistant general manager between 2015 and 2019.
In September, a court in Portugal gave him a four-year suspended sentence after he was charged with 90 offences including hacking and extortion. He is also facing 377 charges in a different case in Portugal.
But this morning’s judgment came after Pinto admitted to the Paris-specific charges.
He told the court: “I accept the facts that you accuse me of. I don't see why we should prolong a judgment any longer. I have already been in the middle of a judicial bureaucracy for five years in Portugal for facts that may be similar to those for which I am present now.” Pinto added that he maintains a “desire to cooperate with all European judicial authorities to continue to do my job.”
Pinto began leaking a trove of more than 18 million documents in 2016 to send shockwaves through football. Working under the pseudonym “John”, he has always claimed that he is a whistleblower rather than a hacker.
Clubs allegedly affected by Pinto’s work included Premier League champions Manchester City , who were handed a UEFA suspension over financial fair play irregularities that was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and the Spanish giants Atletico Madrid, Barcelona and Real Madrid .
A new indictment in Portugal, dated July 4 and signed by prosecutor Vera Camacho, said that 202 of 377 new charges are for qualified unlawful access, 134 are for violation of correspondence, 23 for aggravated violation of correspondence and 18 are for computer damage.
The Public Ministry alleges that Pinto sought “to gain surreptitious and unauthorised access to the computer systems of various entities” and acted "with the intention of improperly entering the computer systems."