[8] In May 2008, the disciplinary committee of the Portuguese Professional Football League, who had opened a parallel non-criminal proceeding called Apito Final (Final Whistle), sentenced Pinto da Costa to a two-year suspension and FC Porto was docked six points in the Primeira Liga and fined €150,000 for attempted bribery;[9] Boavista FC was sentenced to relegation for bribery and referee coercion, and fined €180,000; União de Leiria lost three points and its chairman, João Bartolomeu, was sentenced to a one-year suspension.
In January 2006, the Apito Dourado affair proceeded in Gondomar, and the public prosecution filed charges against 27 people, including Valentim Loureiro, José Oliveira and Pinto de Sousa.
In October 2008, the court filed the case against Pinto da Costa, Augusto Duarte, Rui Alves and António Araújo regarding the Nacional - Benfica match.
In March, the public prosecution asked for the conviction of Pinto da Costa, António Araújo and Augusto Duarte regarding the FC Porto - Beira-Mar match.
In June 2007, 13 of the 24 suspects in the Gondomar part of the affair, mainly related to lower division football, were convicted of charges comprising corruption, influence peddling and abuse of power.
Valentim Loureiro was sentenced to three years and two months of suspended penalty for abuse of power, and lost his position of mayor of Gondomar.
The court considered proven that all three of them had received gold objects but that did not mean that the referees had breached the rules of the game of football association.
In May 2011, the Central Administrative Court of the South of Portugal ruled that the decision of taking six points from FC Porto's global classification in the 2007–08 season, as well as the suspension of FC Porto's president, Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa for two years, both confirmed in 2008 on a controversial meeting made by the Justice Council of the Portuguese Football Federation, were to be ruled as "inexistent", due to the fact that those decisions were taken by a small number of the remaining counselors, after the meeting had been declared finished by the council's president, and acting behind the President's and the Vice-president's back, as they were absent by then.
Several conversations between suspects were recorded during the Apito Dourado investigation, and many of them show talks about referee nominations and performances and briberies.
Some of the most notorious ones include: The Apito Dourado process was a major event in Portuguese football and made international headlines at the time.
Santiago Segurola, Marca's assistant director stated in 2008, "It is terrible what is happening to football (...) In the last few years proven corruption cases have emerged from Italy and Portugal (...) There are people who want to win so much that they are willing to break the rules in the most obscene ways.
One of the big controversies was the fact that the prosecutors had "no doubts" about the Judiciary Police tipping off Pinto da Costa to clear his office hours before the conduction of a search.
The codewords used in the wiretaps have since become common Portuguese football jargon, expressions such as "fruta para dormir" ("fruit to sleep with", a codeword for prostitutes), "dark coffee" and "latte" (referring to the skin tone of the prostitutes), "rebuçado" (literally translated as "candy") being used by both supporters and club officials to mock and attack clubs related to the Apito Dourado wiretaps, such as FC Porto, Boavista FC, CD Nacional and Gondomar SC.