Ministério Público Lodges the Football Leaks Appeal at the Tribunal da Relação de Lisboa — 241-Count Acquittal of Rui Pinto Heads Back for Reformulação on the Computer-Access Distinctions Between Investigations

The Ministério Público (MP, Public Prosecutor's Office) lodged its motivação de recurso (appeal brief) at the Tribunal da Relação de Lisboa (TRL, Lisbon Court of Appeal) on Monday 1 June 2026 against the second-instance acquittal of Portuguese hacker Rui Pinto on 241 informatic-crime counts in the Football Leaks complex. The brief, signed by procuradores Vera Camacho and André Ribeiro da Silva, surfaces in the case file at the TRL on Friday 5 June 2026 — PÚBLICO got first sight of the 700-page motivation.

The MP's pitch turns on what it calls the first-instance court's "desfasamento da realidade" (out-of-step-with-reality) reading of the Football Leaks fact pattern. The prosecutors argue that the Juízo Central Criminal de Lisboa (Central Criminal Court of Lisbon) collapsed multiple discrete investigations into a single act-of-access bucket — and on that erroneous compression, then invoked the ne bis in idem (double-jeopardy) doctrine to acquit. The MP's filing maps four separate computer-access events across four different time windows targeting four different infrastructural targets (Doyen Sports Investments, the Sporting Clube de Portugal SAD systems, the Banco Nacional Ultramarino / Caledonian Bank file deposits, and a fourth target the brief identifies as the law-firm-server access), each of which the prosecution wants the appeals court to recognise as legally autonomous offences.

The MP also opens a second line of attack — the brief reads as a fundamental rejection of the lower court's "desconfiança injustificada" (unjustified distrust) of the Polícia Judiciária (PJ, Judicial Police) investigators and of the search-and-seizure protocol that the Comando Nacional Anti-Corrupção (CNAC) ran on Pinto's Budapest apartment in 2019. The Juízo Central Criminal had said that fundamental violations of human dignity and the rule of law were at stake on the original PJ entry, anchored on what it framed as breaches of the right to effective legal protection. The MP brief calls that reading legally erroneous and procedurally over-reaching.

The appeals court is asked to issue a reformulação order — sending the case back to the Juízo Central Criminal de Lisboa with a binding instruction to re-open the evidence assessment under a corrected legal frame. If the TRL grants the request, the Football Leaks file would re-enter first-instance trial with the 241 counts revived, the PJ search-and-seizure record reinstated, and the ne bis in idem ruling vacated.

Rui Pinto, 37, is the self-styled Football Leaks whistleblower whose 2015-2019 disclosures triggered the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) media consortium reporting that put Cristiano Ronaldo's image-rights structures, the Doyen Sports third-party-ownership scheme, Paris Saint-Germain's Financial Fair Play arrangements and dozens of agent-club deals into the public record. He was extradited from Hungary in 2020 and convicted on a first round of charges in 2023 to a four-year suspended sentence. The second-round Football Leaks acquittal of April 2026 was the headline disposition surprise of the Portuguese justice calendar — both Pinto's defence team and the assistente Benfica had read the courtroom signals as pointing toward conviction.

The TRL now sets the procedural calendar for the appeal hearing. A decision is expected in Q4 2026 or Q1 2027.