Hacker Admits Revealing Finances of Isabel dos Santos
The Portuguese man behind a website that pulled back the curtain on world soccer’s business dealings also unearthed documents related to the fortune of Africa’s richest woman.
The Portuguese fan was looking for soccer’s secrets when he began hacking into the legal and financial networks supporting the game’s multibillion-dollar industry five years ago.
For years, he plundered internal documents and secret agreements, unmasking questionable practices — and even criminality — by lawyers and players and teams, and then published the information anonymously on a platform he called Football Leaks. Furious teams cursed him. Agents threatened to sue him. Embarrassed investigators vowed to arrest him.
What none of them knew was that the enormous trove of data obtained by the hacker, a spiky-haired 31-year-old soccer fanatic named Rui Pinto, also held a much bigger secret.
Over dinner one night in late 2018 in Budapest, where he was hiding before he was eventually detained and extradited to Portugal, Mr. Pinto told his French lawyer William Bourdon that he believed he had obtained information that revealed how Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s richest woman and the daughter of Angola’s former president, had amassed her $2 billion fortune.
Those secrets, revealed this month in international news media accounts, including articles in The New York Times, have led to an investigation of Ms. dos Santos, who is accused of plundering Angola’s state petroleum company and other institutions to bankroll a sprawling business empire that included stakes in the impoverished country’s diamond exports, its dominant mobile phone company, two of its banks and its biggest cement maker.
Mr. Pinto’s lawyers, Mr. Bourdon and Francisco Teixeira Da Mota, confirmed in a news release on Monday that their client had been the source of the so-called Luanda leaks, as the trove of dos Santos documents has come to be known. The lawyers also claimed credit for the legal and criminal repercussions of their release, saying that without the “revelations, made possible thanks to our client, the regulatory, police and judicial authorities would have done nothing.”
Until his arrest and extradition to Portugal last March, Mr. Pinto had since 2015 mostly sowed panic within the corridors of power in the world’s most popular sport. In his hacking, he had targeted not only some of soccer’s biggest teams and institutions but also law firms and professional services that supported their activities.
One connection between the soccer and dos Santos leaks is that each included the release of confidential documents from the powerful PLMJ law firm, which is based in Lisbon. Several of the charges Mr. Pinto faces in Portugal are directly linked to his illegally gaining access to PLMJ’s computer server.
It was lawyers from PLMJ who in 2015 prepared a 16-page brief for Ms. dos Santos pointing out the tax advantages of domiciling companies in Malta. Ms. dos Santos subsequently used companies based in Malta for some of her most high-profile transactions. One of her Maltese companies was used as a middleman to hire consultants from firms such as Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company and PwC for advice on overhauling Angola’s state oil company, where she served as chairwoman from 2016 to 2017, after being appointed to the post by her father.
“We have of course no knowledge of the source of the documentation on which the recent press stories are based,” said Luís Pais Antunes, a managing partner at PLMJ. In any case, he added, “It is impossible that the documentation that is being used for the bulk of the stories is in any way related to PLMJ or was ever at our disposal.”
Unsure of exactly what he had when his soccer hacking turned up hundreds of thousands of pages related to the companies controlled by Ms. dos Santos and her husband, Mr. Pinto asked Mr. Bourdon, according to the French lawyer, if he could take a hard drive containing the data to a whistle-blower platform Mr. Bourdon had set up in Africa.
Mr. Bourdon said in an interview in the past week that he quickly came to the conclusion that the scale and complexity of the information meant it needed to be shared with the more experienced and better resourced International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. In the past week, that consortium and international news media organizations, including The Times, published details of Ms. dos Santos’s business dealings.
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