Lawyer Luiz Felipe Maia of Maia Yoshiyasu Advogados has called Brazil's ban on betting a political decision and expects it to be struck down. He spoke at SBC Lisbon about the measure the country's president announced in late September.
Reversal and the SPA rules
In Maia's reading, the ban cuts short the maturing of the legal market and deepens the sense of legal instability investors already carry. He considers it realistic that the National Congress and the courts reject it. He rates the regulation built by the Secretariat of Prizes and Betting (SPA) highly, pointing to its identification and compliance mechanisms, and says Brazil's rules rank among the best in the world. The market grew up fast after the 2025 launch, he said. For operators, the 30 million BRL licence fee now looks like payment for a risk the state rewrote after the fact. The timing gives the motive away: the provisional measure arrived without an assessment of its fiscal consequences.
Maia called the debt-protection argument cheap opportunism. The president cited suicides caused by debt, he said, without checking whether the debt was tied to gambling. Close industries over other people's failures, he argued, and mining would go over environmental disasters while drinks maker Ambev would go over drunk-driving deaths and cirrhosis.
What the ban costs
He put the economic price of the ban at 15 billion BRL ($2.99 billion) in lost revenue a year, with nothing to replace it. That is a gift to criminality. The decision simply hands 30 million players to the illegal market and organised crime. For licensed companies it is a reason to go through their contracts, and the state itself faces compensation claims for non-performance.
Maia also criticised the Prosecutor General's lawsuit seeking 1 billion BRL in moral damages and 2.6 billion BRL for the SUS public health system. Operators worked within the law, so there are no grounds for compensation, and he called the calculation method invented. A player's sick leave is written down automatically as a consequence of betting. The courts will reject the claim, he said.
