Heard as a defense witness to the main defendant in the 'Football Leaks' case, at the 38th session of the trial at the Central Court of Criminal Investigation, in Lisbon, Henri Thulliez, director of the PPLAAF platform - of which lawyer William Bourdon (who represented internationally Rui Pinto) is the president - said that Bourdon had access in 2018 to an external disk "with a considerable amount of sensitive information" about Africa.
"[The journalists] carried out an investigation into the disc and immediately found two potential stories: one about the impoverishment and plundering of the African population and the concertation between Western intermediaries to facilitate this plundering," explained Henri Thulliez by video conference, underlining: "Journalists started publishing in January 2020 and produced a real earthquake."
According to the testimony carried out by video-conference and using a translator, the lawyer and director of the platform, created in March 2017, assured that initially he did not know that Rui Pinto would be the source of the information, noting later that this did not require any compensation. in return, but only "serious journalistic work" of the data provided.
"At the time I didn't know who was behind 'Football Leaks'. At the end of 2018, William Bourdon told me that the founder of 'Football Leaks' was the one who gave him the record. I realized it was the same person when he was arrested. He did not know the identity of who was behind the 'Luanda Leaks' and 'Football Leaks' ", he said, without failing to reveal after having had a telephone contact with the creator of the website that stirred up football in 2015 European.
Asked about the consequences of the revelations made public in the context of the 'Luanda Leaks' case - which exposed in January 2020 alleged financial schemes of businesswoman Isabel dos Santos and her husband, which will have allowed them to withdraw money from the public purse through tax havens - , Henri Thulliez stressed that these were felt "in Africa and around the world, because corruption is cross-border".
"In Lisbon, dozens of bank accounts were frozen. In May 2020, the German police found documents in a bank involving Isabel dos Santos. There was a European banking authority that launched an investigation following the disclosure of 'Luanda Leaks'. September 2020, a Dutch prosecutor froze accounts of a company associated with Sonangol ", he enumerated, reiterating the existence of" ongoing investigations "in several countries and summarizing:" With these revelations, it has become impossible for Angola and Portugal to remain calm ".
Regarding the option of delivering the information contained in more than 715 thousand files to a consortium of journalists and not to the judicial authorities, the director of PPLAAF (Plateforme de Protection des Lanceurs d'Alerte en Afrique, in the acronym in French) listed three reasons that were at the basis of Rui Pinto's decision.
"It was clear the whistleblower's intention that this information should be revealed, that the platform's researchers are sometimes more effective than the authorities in the countries and that if this information were made available to the authorities it would not raise public pressure that only disclosure of the media allows ", he said.
Henri Thulliez ended his hearing by defending the value of the disclosures, emphasizing that "the general interest prevails over the way in which the information was obtained".
The trial continues in the afternoon with hearings of witnesses Francisco Empis, former communications director at Doyen, and Giuseppe Russo, sociologist and Italian researcher. In the morning, the hearings of Arif Efendi and Adam Gomes did not take place, which will be the target of another attempt at notification and rescheduling.
Rui Pinto, 32, is responsible for a total of 90 crimes: 68 of undue access, 14 of violation of correspondence, six of illegitimate access, targeting entities such as Sporting, Doyen, the PLMJ law firm, the Portuguese Federation of Football (FPF) and the Portuguese Attorney General's Office (PGR), and also for computer sabotage to Sporting's SAD and for extortion, in the attempted form. This last crime concerns Doyen and was also what led to the pronunciation of the lawyer Aníbal Pinto.
The creator of 'Football Leaks' has been free since 7 August, "due to his collaboration" with the Judiciary Police (PJ) and his "critical sense", but is, for security reasons, inserted in the program protection of witnesses in an undisclosed location and under police protection.
