إلغاء أمر الحماية بسبب مخالفات إجرائية — مُبلِّغ الانتهاكات المالية لنادي مانشستر سيتي لا يزال تحت تهديد حقيقي

According to Al Jazeera's report on October 10, Portugal's Ministry of Justice confirmed on that day that Rui Pinto, the whistleblower who had pushed the Premier League to investigate Manchester City's financial violations, will remain under police protection. The witness protection measures, which were originally scheduled to end on October 10, were overturned due to procedural violations — the Ministry admitted that it had previously failed to 'notify [him of] the reasons for the decision in accordance with the law,' and had not given Pinto an opportunity to defend himself.

According to Al Jazeera's report, Pinto's lawyer publicly accused the relevant procedures of having violations last week, emphasizing that his client faces real personal threats. In April this year, Pinto was attacked in Lisbon, and has since been forced to relocate to a secret location due to continued death threats.

Public records show that Pinto is a central figure in the 'Football Leaks' website. Internal documents he obtained and published showed that this Premier League club violated Premier League financial rules between 2009 and 2018. An independent commission subsequently ruled that 114 of the 115 charges against Manchester City were established, with the exception of one. These documents, published through the European Investigative Collaborations consortium, triggered tax adjustments and judicial investigations in multiple European countries, exposing numerous suspicious operations by clubs, players, and agents.

However, the person who exposed this information has long occupied a dual status as a criminal defendant and a protected witness. In January 2019, Pinto was arrested in Hungary and extradited to Portugal, where he spent more than a year in pre-trial detention. In 2020, he agreed to hand over millions of encrypted documents to the Portuguese authorities, thereby obtaining protected witness status. In September 2023, a Portuguese court sentenced him to four years in prison, suspended, on charges including attempted extortion, illegal acquisition of data, and violation of communication secrecy.

Al Jazeera noted that Portugal's Ministry of Justice has not yet announced a specific timetable for reconsidering the protection measures. The lapse of a single witness protection order could have left Pinto completely exposed to ongoing death threats — the procedural errors occurred after he had already borne significant personal costs for the public interest, exposing how the state protection mechanism remains insufficient in shielding whistleblowers when faced with powerful sports and capital stakeholders.