Lula Says He Would Ban Betting, and the Regulator Was Not in the Room

The Brazilian president spent four hours hearing evidence against the industry his own government licensed two years ago. The Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas, which regulates it, does not appear on the attendance list.

• President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said on 1 September that if it depended on his personal view, betting would be prohibited, and that his decision on what action to take is "two-thirds" made
• He spoke at the end of a meeting at the Palácio do Planalto lasting more than four hours, livestreamed, with ministers and around 15 civil society representatives
• The reported attendance covered health, family, economic and social themes, and included the CNBB, Conic, the CNC, the CNI, Febraban and Dieese, alongside cultural figures
• No operator, no industry association such as ANJL or IBJR, and nobody from the Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas, the betting regulator inside the Ministry of Finance, appears on the reported list
• Figures presented included 11 million Brazilians described as in critical situations from online betting, R$143 billion said to have left circulation between 2023 and 2025, R$62 billion removed from family budgets in 2025, and 10.5% of Brazilian children having gambled

A President Who Licensed the Market Says He Would Ban It

Brazil legalised and licensed fixed-odds betting under Law 14,790/2023, built a regulator inside the Ministry of Finance to run it, and has spent two years issuing authorisations, raising the tax and building enforcement machinery. On 1 September the president who signed that law said that if it were down to his personal view, the industry would be prohibited.

Lula made the remark at the close of a meeting at the Palácio do Planalto that ran for more than four hours and was livestreamed. He said his decision on what the government should do was "two-thirds" made, that the state needed to take more drastic action, and that he still had to share the decision properly before settling it. No decree and no provisional measure was announced. A further meeting, restricted to ministers, is expected to follow.

The composition of the room is the part the industry should read closely. Reported attendees included the health minister Alexandre Padilha, the sports minister Paulo Henrique Cordeiro, the Civil House minister Miriam Belchior and the Finance Ministry's executive secretary Rogério Ceron, alongside around 15 civil society representatives: the Catholic bishops' conference CNBB, represented by Cardinal Jaime Spengler, the ecumenical council Conic, the commerce and industry confederations CNC and CNI, the banking federation Febraban, the labour statistics institute Dieese, health and social bodies, and cultural figures including Paula Lavigne and the musician Emicida.

Absent from that list is anyone from the Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas, the unit inside the Ministry of Finance that licenses and supervises the sector. Also absent are the two principal industry associations, ANJL and IBJR, and any licensed operator. The Finance Ministry was represented, but by its executive secretary rather than by the regulator.

The evidence presented was uniformly critical. The figures cited included 11 million Brazilians said to be in critical situations because of online betting, R$143 billion described as having ceased circulating in the economy between 2023 and 2025, R$62 billion said to have been removed from family budgets in 2025, and a finding that 10.5% of Brazilian children have already gambled. Lula returned to what he called invisible debt, where people conceal betting losses from their families, a theme he has connected to his own debt relief programme.

None of those figures were tested in the room by anyone with an interest in contesting them. Some are contested: the ANJL has previously rejected a claimed link between gambling and falling university enrolment, and the methodology behind large "money removed from the economy" estimates has been disputed by the sector before.

A Consultation Without the Regulator Is a Signal, Not an Oversight

Governments hold one-sided hearings all the time, and an industry has no automatic right to a seat. What is harder to read as routine is the absence of the SPA. The regulator is the part of the state that holds the licensing data, the enforcement record and the operational picture of what the two-year-old regime has and has not achieved, and it is the body that would have to implement whatever the president decides. Convening a four-hour evidentiary session on the sector without it, while including the Finance Ministry at executive-secretary level, suggests the question being asked at the Planalto is not "is the regulatory framework working" but "should this exist at all". Those are different questions with different answers, and only the first one has an evidence base the state itself has collected.

The Regulated Market Is the Only Part a Ban Can Reach

The structural problem with a prohibition instinct in Brazil is that it operates on the licensed half of the market. Two years of policy have been aimed at pulling players from unlicensed sites into a taxed, monitored, self-exclusion-enforced system, including the centralised prohibited-bettor platform built for exactly that purpose. Every measure that makes licensed play less available shifts volume to operators who file no accounts, pay no tax, honour no self-exclusion list and cannot be summoned to the Planalto. The harm data presented at the meeting is largely a description of a market that was unregulated until very recently, and attributing it to the licensed regime without separating the two is the analytical step nobody in that room was positioned to challenge. If the state concludes it must act more drastically, the decisive question is whether the action reduces gambling or merely relocates it.

Two-Thirds of a Decision Is Enough to Move Capital

For operators, investors and suppliers the practical content of yesterday is a policy signal without a policy. There is no decree, no provisional measure and no bill, only a president saying he is two-thirds of the way to something and would personally prefer prohibition. That is sufficient to affect investment committees, licence valuations and the willingness of banks and payment providers to serve the sector, all of which respond to expected regulatory direction rather than to enacted rules. Brazil spent two years building the most consequential new regulated market in the world and persuading international capital to underwrite it. The cost of an unresolved "two-thirds" is paid in that currency, and it accrues daily until the ministers' meeting produces something specific.

The president is entitled to his view and the harm evidence deserves to be heard. But a state that licenses an industry, taxes it and then debates its existence without inviting its own regulator is not yet having the conversation its own framework was designed to inform.