The prison is one of the famous tourist spots in Portugal with River Tagus has around 25 tiny cells. It is known for storing the terrorists and serious criminals as it has the depths of a giant white building. The prison has been home to Rui Pinto for almost the last year. The high-security facility provided in Lisbon is usually reserved for only the most dangerous criminals.
Rui Pinto, the whistleblower, is still awaiting trial for alleged extortion, violation of secrecy and illegally accessing information regarding the Euro papers. Rui Pinto created the website called Football Leaks which provided the evidence for those errors made by Manchester City in the dealings and which has potentially led to the Champions League ban for the Cityzens.
Rui Pinto had been extradited from his native country, Hungary in 2019 but his lawyers have filed a complaint to the EU commission over the fallacies in the original arrest warrant. When the initial warrant had 147 days as a custody period for Pinto, it was reduced to 90 days. However, reports suggest that it might be up to 30 years of punishment for Rui Pinto.
Rafael Buschman, lawyer of Rui Pinto is not ready to give up and said:
“We met him for the first time in about seven or eight months in December,”
“He had just finished six months in isolation and I expected to find someone who was in a very bad mental situation but he wasn’t at all. Rui was very focused and said it was important for him not to lose his mind because all of the passwords for the hard drives are in his head.
He knows all of the authorities in Portugal are afraid because he is still in a position to release whatever other evidence he has.”
The German sports outlet, Der Spiegel, reporter Christoph Winterbach first discovered the emails that appeared to indicate Manchester City were flouting UEFA’s FFP rules. Also, he saw the infamous though famous line “1 down, 6 to go” allegedly sent by the Manchester City lawyer Simon Cliff after he was informed that one of UEFA’s seven investigators, Jean-Luc Dehaene, had died.
Buchman also added:
“I talked with Rui’s family a few days ago after City were banned and they told me that the first thing he said was: ‘Why only two years?’”
“The second question he had was: ‘Why didn’t Uefa call me?’ It seems strange that they wouldn’t make some contact with the person who provided their strongest evidence.”
Der Speigel reporter added:
“There’s a clear correlation between the publication of our article and the investigation,”
“Three weeks later, they wrote the first letter to City asking about our revelations and they started the formal investigation when we published another piece online which showed excerpts from the emails. I don’t think that would have happened without Rui’s evidence.”
The reigning Premier League champions have denied the wrongdoing in the financial aspect and have denied accepting the charges. Also, they have said that Rui Pinto hasn’t hacked their servers and systems.
On the other hand, Manchester City is set to appeal to the Court of Arbitration of Sport (CAS) against their Champions League ban for two years. However, Pinto is considered as a witness by Parquet National Financier. And the recent hand of 26 Terabytes of data which is considered to be nine times bigger the original cache data seems to be the final nail in the City’s coffin.
