The regulator didn't show up, and the government delivered rhetoric: the weaknesses in the defense of the Betting Provisional Measure in the Supreme Court.
The public hearing convened by Minister Luiz Fux this Tuesday (3) was supposed to be the space for the government to show the Supreme Court the technical evidence that justified Provisional Measure 1.394/2026. The meeting took place within the scope of ADI 8.027, which questions the constitutionality of the MP that prohibited the operation and advertising of bets in the country. After a whole day of presentations, the conclusion is that the evidence did not appear. What was seen was a parade of rhetoric, numbers without methodological basis and an absence that says a lot.
The empty chair of the regulator
The most eloquent absence was that of the Secretariat of Prizes and Betting (SPA-MF), the body within the Ministry of Finance that regulated, authorized, supervised, and monitored the market for 22 months. It is the SPA-MF that holds the data on bettors, GGR (Gambling Risk Group), self-exclusion data, blocking of illegal websites, and revenue collection. If anyone could demonstrate to the Supreme Federal Court, with official figures, that the regulation had failed, it was the regulator itself.
The Finance Ministry preferred to send the Undersecretary for Fiscal Policy, Rodrigo Toneto. He defended the ban, arguing that the regulation, although it had broadened oversight, was not sufficient to contain the economic, social, and public health damage. He did not present a single regulatory indicator to support this claim.
The choice doesn't seem accidental. BNLData obtained, via the Access to Information Law, the SPA-MF Periodic Overview for the first quarter of 2026, a report that was ready but not released. Official data from SPA itself shows a GGR of R$ 36,9 billion in 2025 and R$ 20,07 billion in the first half of 2026. These figures dismantle a good portion of the numbers used to justify the Provisional Measure. Taking the regulator to the Supreme Court would mean exposing it to questions the government doesn't want to answer.
Philosophy instead of data.
In the absence of data, Toneto offered a metaphor. He compared the betting to a "pandemic" and stated that "life is more important than the profit of the few" and that the popular economy should prevail over that of the privileged.
The argument doesn't withstand simple scrutiny. The "profit of the few" was, for 22 months, revenue for many: the legal beneficiaries of Law 14.790/2023, such as Health, Sports, Tourism, Public Security, and Social Security, in addition to the federal taxes collected by the Revenue Service. The Ministry of Finance was not a spectator in this market. It was its architect, regulator, and collector. Those who speak of a "pandemic" omit the fact that the government was a partner in the operation until September 25th.
The dragon that the State gave up trying to tame.
Brazil's Attorney General, Jorge Messias, went even further. He stated that the regulations failed to contain the losses and that the State has a duty to act when protection mechanisms prove insufficient, summarizing his argument in one sentence: "This dragon was impossible to tame."
It's an admission of state incompetence, not a legal argument. The same government that drafted Law 14.790/2023, sanctioned the inclusion of online games, and defended regulation before the Supreme Court in the November 2024 hearing, now declares that the dragon is untamable. What changed in 22 months wasn't the evidence. It was the electoral calendar.
The inverted logic of Justice
When introduced by Fux to present the figures on the illegal market, the Minister of Justice, Wellington César Lima e Silva, gave a rhetorical speech. According to him, the coexistence of authorized and clandestine platforms made it difficult to monitor and combat the use of betting by organized crime.
The obvious conclusion from the diagnosis itself is the opposite of that of the Provisional Measure. If coexistence made oversight difficult, the proposed solution eliminates precisely the regulated part and leaves only the clandestine one. Before the Provisional Measure, the illegal market already accounted for more than 40% of bets. LegitBet reports shared by ANJL show the growth of illegal platforms after the ban, with no age control, no spending limits, accepting credit cards, and without a single cent of revenue. The minister said nothing about this.
Health figures and the "15 times" without source.
Minister Alexandre Padilha stated that 28 million Brazilians gambled in the last 12 months, 10,9 million of whom exhibit risky or problematic behavior. He also cited a more than 200% increase in demand for the SUS (Brazilian public healthcare system) for gambling-related problems between 2018 and 2026, and research linking gambling addiction to a suicide risk up to 15 times higher.
The minister did not say where he got the most serious statistic from his presentation. Before the Supreme Court, in a hearing convened precisely to gather evidence, this omission is not a minor detail. BNLData investigated the source.
The figure corresponds to the main international study on the subject, by Anna Karlsson and Anders Håkansson of Lund University, published in 2018. The research used Swedish national records and found a suicide mortality rate 15 times higher among people aged 20 to 74 diagnosed with gambling disorder in the healthcare system, compared to the general population. So far, the number exists. The problem is what it measures and what the minister did with it.
First: this is not about gamblers. The study followed 2.099 people treated in Swedish hospitals between 2006 and 2016, all with a clinical diagnosis of pathological gambling. Extrapolating this result to 28 million Brazilian gamblers, or to the 10,9 million that the minister classified as "at risk," is a leap that no serious epidemiologist would endorse.
Second: these were seriously ill patients with other illnesses. More than half of the group (51%) suffered from depression, 41% had substance use disorders, 29% had alcohol use disorders, 19% had personality disorders, and 12% were bipolar. The authors themselves warned that the results could reflect the most severe cases.
Third: the authors revised the conclusion. In 2025, the same team published a larger study, with 10.782 people diagnosed in Sweden between 2005 and 2019. When the researchers controlled for other factors, gambling disorder did not show a significant association with suicide mortality; in men, the associated factors were substance use and low education. The conclusion was that comorbidities and socioeconomic status appear to be important reasons for increased mortality. The minister took the 2018 version to the Supreme Court and ignored the 2025 version.
Fourth: the mistake has already been made and challenged. In the United Kingdom, Public Health England applied the rates from the Swedish study to estimates of "problem gambling" in England and arrived at 409 deaths per year. The calculation was questioned in the British Parliament precisely because it used seriously ill hospitalized patients as a benchmark for the entire population of gamblers. The Brazilian government is now repeating, in the Supreme Court, a mistake that already has a name and a history.
None of this means that pathological gambling isn't a serious problem. It is, and the regulated market recognized this by funding treatment with part of the revenue. But using a number of severely psychiatric patients, without citing the source, to justify banning a legal activity is exactly the kind of claim that receives the BNLData Narrative Seal.
The other figures also don't hold up when considered together. If 10,9 million out of 28 million are at risk, the rate would be almost 39% of gamblers, unparalleled in any market in the world and incompatible with the estimate of pathological gambling of around 1,2% used as an international benchmark. The 200% increase starts from a small base and covers a period that includes the years without regulation. The response from the Ministry of Health itself to the BNLData Access to Information Law showed that the telephone service for gamblers received 291 requests, compared to a contracted capacity of 100 per month.
There is also the paradox that the minister avoided: with the provisional measure, the Health Ministry loses the share of revenue that the law allocated to treatment and ends up bearing the sole cost of caring for gamblers, now pushed to illegal websites.
BNLData will forward a request to the Ministry of Health asking them to disclose the source of the data presented to the Supreme Federal Court.
CNC and ABRAS: the retail narrative
The CNC argued that betting takes money away from family budgets and reduces consumption, citing losses of R$ 62 billion among bettors. The official GDP for 2025, according to SPA, was R$ 36,9 billion. The R$ 62 billion figure is an estimate without official verification, the same one that received the BNLData Narrative Seal when it appeared in the Secom carousel.
ABRAS presented a survey showing that food sales grew 6,5% in the week of October 5-11 and 6,3% in the following week, compared to the same periods in 2025, attributing everything to the ban. However, the first week coincides with the deadline for bettors to withdraw their balances from the platforms, which ended on October 5, and precedes Children's Day, which fell on a Monday in 2026 and on a Sunday in 2025. With a turnover of around R$ 20 billion per week, a 6,5% increase represents more than R$ 1,3 billion, when the average weekly gross revenue from bets was around R$ 770 million. All the bettors' money would have to go to the supermarket, and there would still be a shortage. In the press conference on October 29, ABRAS presented no control whatsoever for these variables.
Economist Erick Brasil, speaking on behalf of the Brazilian Association for Economic Freedom (ABLE), used weekly figures from ABRAS itself, previously cited by the organization's president, João Galassi, as proof that the end of betting had increased food consumption. Erick Brasil's interpretation was different: the data shows neither correlation nor causality. "We can call these points errors, intellectual dishonesty, often even fake news. But more important than labeling them is presenting public data," he stated.
The CDC and selectivity
The National Consumer Secretary, Ricardo Morishita Wada, argued that the Consumer Protection Code (CDC) does not allow highly harmful products or activities to remain on the market. If that were the criterion, alcohol and tobacco, legal activities with much greater externalities, would be prohibited. They are not. They are regulated, taxed, and monitored, exactly as betting was until September.
Speak and leave
The most revealing episode wasn't in the speeches, but in the behavior. The Attorney General, the Minister of Justice, and First Lady Janja left the session after their speeches, without listening to clubs, confederations, broadcasters, operators, and researchers. This is consistent with the meeting at the Presidential Palace where the government only listened to those opposed to the sector, and with the Attorney General's request to broaden the hearing to include entities aligned with the ban. The government went to the Supreme Court to speak, not to debate.
The sector took what the government didn't: data.
While government representatives relied on rhetoric, the entities representing the regulated sector did the opposite. They took to the podium with a timeline, official figures, and legal arguments, exposing, one by one, the weaknesses in the speeches that preceded them.
On behalf of ANJL, lawyer Pietro Lorenzoni pointed out a "premise error" in the authorities' statements: the government treats prohibition as synonymous with the absence of gambling. He dismantled the statistical basis used to justify the Provisional Measure. The Lenad 3 study, which indicates 11 million people with potential gambling-related disorders, is from 2023, prior to regulation, and covers all forms of gambling, not just regulated betting, which did not yet exist. He also recalled that the CNC's own study on the impact of gambling on families concludes that the appropriate response is more regulation, not prohibition. It was the CNC, therefore, that provided the argument against the thesis it itself defended in court.
Lorenzoni also responded directly to the image chosen by Jorge Messias. Betting companies have been operating in the country since 2005: they moved R$ 2 billion in 2013, more than R$ 5 billion in 2018 and R$ 28 billion in 2023, before Law 14.790. The regulation, he said, was an attempt to tame a dragon that already existed. It didn't create it.
The lawyer listed what the sector delivered to the State in 22 months: grants of R$ 30 million per operator, almost R$ 3 billion to public coffers in addition to taxes, more than R$ 1 billion per year for football, R$ 2,6 billion for Olympic and Paralympic sports, and R$ 1,4 billion in advertising. He also cited data from the Treasury itself: a 32% drop in the volume wagered in 2026 and a channeling of more than 60% to the regulated market. In other words, the regulation was working, according to the figures from the same ministry that sent a sub-secretary to the Supreme Court to speak about the “pandemic.”
The Brazilian Institute of Judicial Research (IBJR), co-author of ADI 8027, gave the most objective presentation of the day. It focused on the request for an injunction: suspension of the effects of the Provisional Measure until Congress pronounces itself or until the merits of the case are judged. The central argument was that there is no urgency. The topic has been debated for years in Congress, which chose regulated gambling. The speaker observed that no one, throughout the hearing, presented a solution to end illegal gambling, and warned that the Provisional Measure places Congress before a fait accompli: when the measure is voted on, the damage will already have occurred.
The two entities were joined by other technical voices. ANSEJA, author of ADI 8024, showed that the estimated fiscal impact of the Provisional Measure was underestimated. The explanatory memorandum predicted a loss of R$ 1,5 billion in 2026 and R$ 5,1 billion in 2027, but the 2027 Budget Bill itself already projected R$ 6,7 billion in fixed-odds betting, and the sector generated approximately R$ 1,2 billion per month in federal revenue. The actual figure reaches at least R$ 12,7 billion, double the estimate. Abracrim warned of a perverse effect: the very gambler whom the government claims to protect, including the gambling addict, could be held liable for money laundering when receiving funds from a website, because paragraph 2 of article 50 of the Law on Criminal Offenses is in effect.
The clubs completed the picture with concrete figures. Flamengo estimated losses of R$ 430 million per year and Fluminense, R$ 200 million; Vitória reported that contracts with betting companies totaled R$ 45 million, about 17% of its revenue. The CBF stated that the end of betting interrupted sponsorship negotiations for 2027 to 2030 and could cause losses of R$ 420 million as early as next year.
The contrast was evident. On one side, metaphors about dragons and pandemics and a suicide statistic without a source. On the other, historical series, figures from the Treasury, the PLOA (Annual Budget Law Project), and the CNC (National Confederation of Commerce) itself. Those who went to the Supreme Court to debate brought evidence. Those who went to give speeches left before hearing it.
What's left for Fux?
The rapporteur opened the session by reaffirming his personal position on gambling addiction, but highlighted the central point: the analysis of the prohibition also requires attention to legal certainty and the protection of legitimate expectations, including the possible modulation of the effects of the decision. It is in this area that the government came away empty-handed: it did not explain the urgency, did not present an impact study, and did not bring the regulator.
Nevertheless, the minister's statements were marked by ambiguity. Fux seemed sensitive to the repercussions on social media, where the government played hardball and even mobilized digital activist channels like Lula's Army to pressure the Supreme Court. It remains to be seen whether the rapporteur will face the resistance from the government and social media and grant an injunction suspending the effects of the provisional measure, or whether he will prefer to take the decision to the full court, diluting the responsibility and, with it, the sector's time. The answer should come in the next few days.
One thing, however, is already clear, and was confirmed to this editor by a left-wing congressman: regardless of what the Supreme Court decides, the final battle will be in Congress. Even a favorable injunction would be provisional. The provisional measure blocks the agenda on November 9th, the initial deadline expires on November 23rd, and if it is not voted on, it lapses in March. The government, which lost the technical debate in the Supreme Court, is betting on emotion and digital mobilization. The regulated sector, which has the data, will have to learn how to take it to social networks and to parliamentarians in their constituencies, with faces and stories: the laid-off worker, the club without sponsorship, the fan who protested in the stadium, and the recreational gambler pushed to a website without age control or spending limits.
The hearing confirmed what the industry has been warning about since September. The ban does not eliminate demand, it only transfers it to those who do not pay taxes, it does not protect the bettor and it answers to no one.
At the close of her presentation, lawyer Ana Clara Marques de Barros Santos, from the International Gaming Association (AIGAMING), kindly quoted this editor: “The real question is not whether it should exist, but who governs it, the State or illegality. Good people and public authorities should think very carefully before transforming their good intentions into new business for organized crime.” Thanks are due for the reference and, above all, for the summary of the day, which serves as a message to the Supreme Court and Congress: “Today, we are not discussing who likes gambling or who doesn’t. We are talking about protecting gamblers and legal security.”
