When is a whistleblower a criminal?

Almost three years after Rui Pinto was first publicly named by the Spanish newspaper Marca, as the source behind the “Football Leaks,” he was arrested on a warrant by Portuguese authorities and ultimately extradited to Portugal to face some 90 criminal counts.

The Football Leaks website, established in 2015, routinely posted information revealing serious legal violations occurring within the European football community, including player tax evasion, and most recently, in February, violations of UEFA’s Fair Financial Play Regulations (resulting in reigning Premier League champions Manchester City being banned from the Champions League and fined €30 million). Pinto also worked under the pseudonym “John” with members of the media network known as the European Investigative Collaborators (“EIC”). With EIC, he retrieved and produced around 70 million documents and 3.4 terabytes of private information from major players in the European soccer arena, effectively shedding light on the seedy underbelly of European soccer, and resulting in criminal prosecutions of several top players.

Then, in a surprising turn, in January, it was revealed that Pinto uncovered a much larger secret—evidence that Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s richest woman and the daughter of Angola’s former president, exploited her country’s wealth to amass a $2 billion fortune.

The question then becomes, in light of the valuable information Pinto has provided to the public and law enforcement, why is he being treated like a criminal?

Essentially, Pinto uncovered the information on illegal activities through hacking, a crime throughout the European Union. Additionally, on one occasion, he attempted to extort Doyen Sports by demanding as much as 1 million euros in return for not disclosing sensitive information related to players represented by the agency. Additionally, Pinto publicly posted the private information he discovered—he did not publish it through proscribed whistleblower channels that might have ensured him confidentiality or immunity. Therefore, this case underscores that whistleblowers must be very careful in how and to whom they produce their information, particularly because different countries provide vastly varying whistleblower protections.

Furthermore, Pinto’s case demonstrates the importance of having strong mechanisms in place to allow whistleblowers to safely and legally report all types of illegal conduct. Nations sincerely hoping to root out real corruption must have comprehensive, well-understood, and trusted whistleblower programs. In this case, critics of the Portuguese police believe that fighting corruption is not the state’s actual goal due to the three-year gap between Pinto’s arrest and the public release of his identity.

According to his legal team, Portuguese prosecutors are blocking Pinto’s efforts to cooperate with investigators in other jurisdictions while waging a public campaign to silence Pinto. Portuguese prosecutors should not seek to “make an example out of Pinto.” They must fairly prosecute him for only the specific crimes he committed, encourage his cooperation with law enforcement from other countries, and shield him from threats. Portugal should take these measures to make it clear they are not trying to silence Pinto for being a whistleblower.