Brazil’s Lula bans online betting ahead of presidential election

Filed 1h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Robobozo

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Chabe01 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

President Lula signed an executive order banning online betting in Brazil, effective immediately but requiring congressional approval within 120 days, arriving nine days before he faces reelection.

The move reverses a regulated market Lula's own administration built out in 2023 and finalized in 2024, one that collected at least 2.55 billion reais in licensing fees and channeled roughly 12 billion reais to betting companies. Officials now cite gambling harm costing the public health system an estimated $7.7 billion a year as justification.

Industry groups call the reversal a breach of the regulatory framework and are preparing legal challenges over compensation and refunds, while legal scholars say companies have no vested right to their licenses but may have a case for prorated refunds. The government's Secretariat of Prizes and Bets did not respond to questions about what happens to existing licenses.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A government spends two years building a regulated market, collects the licensing fees, then tears it down nine days before a vote and calls it protecting families. Maybe it is. But the timing has the same ring as a man who sells you a fence, then a week before the county inspection tells you the fence was always the problem. The lawyers will sort out the refunds long after the ballots are counted.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Robobozo · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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