Rui Pinto. It sounds like an up-coming future football star from Portugal who is about to try his luck in the Premier League. But in fact, he is the man who discovered the Manchester City’s documents which lead to 115 charges, 114 of whom proved to be correct. And before we get to see the original explanation of the independent commission, let’s hear from the man who started it all.“A historic decision for English football, and one that comes to crown the work I carried out through Football Leaks. We all know now that, through structural manipulation and financial manoeuvring, Manchester City did not merely circumvent the rules, they turned them into a mere formality, challenging any attempt to preserve the integrity of the competition. That meticulously orchestrated fraud will finally be subject to punishment, and the impact will not merely be turbulent, but truly devastating for the Cityzens” he tweeted after the initial news about the decision of the commission broke out.##LINKED_NEWS_69369##But who is Rui Pinto? In short, he is a self-taught computer enthusiast who founded Football Leaks, the platform that exposed millions of confidential documents linked to some of the biggest clubs, players and organisations in world football, but the Manchester City founding was his best work to date. His earliest revelations mostly consisted of domestic leaks which included Benfica and even his boyhood club Porto. But Pinto got a hold of millions of documents from Manchester City and shared them with journalist Rafael Buschmann from the German magazine Der Spiegel. Once they published it, the cat was right out of the bag.##LINKED_NEWS_69353##Rui Pinto will always be a subject of debate. For some, he is the modern Robin Hood, who stood up for the poor (in this case the lovers of the game) and revealed the ‘dark lords’ of the football business, but for others, he is just a thief, a hacker who stole documents. His life will never be the same as he suffered ever since the documents came out. He was arrested in Hungary in 2019 and extradited to Portugal and has at various points been in solitary confinement, under house arrest and in witness protection.##LINKED_NEWS_69340##He received a four-year suspended sentence in 2023, having been found guilty of attempted extortion, illegal access to data and breach of correspondence. A separate trial in France resulted in a six-month suspended prison sentence a few months later. In 2020, Pinto became a protected witness in Portugal in exchange for granting the Polícia Judiciaria – the country’s criminal investigation police – access to the hard drives and assisting with a number of investigations. He remains under police protection and has lived in safehouses, with his current whereabouts kept confidential.UEFA NATIONS LEAGUE – DIVISION AMonday21.45: (3.90) Belgium (3.70) France (1.90)21.45: (2.70) Turkey (3.35) Italy (2.60)Tuesday21.45: (7.25) Czech R. (4.40) England (1.45)21.45: (1.30) Spain (5.50) Croatia (10.0)***odds are subject to change***