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Government held an online betting session without inviting any representatives from the regulated betting industry
Brazil’s Associação Nacional de Jogos e Loterias (ANJL) has formally objected to a Tuesday meeting convened by President Lula to discuss the impacts of online sports betting, after the government held the session without inviting any representatives from the regulated betting industry itself.
The meeting brought together health, culture and economic organisations, civil society groups and religious institutions, several of which, according to ANJL, had already taken public positions critical of the betting sector. No representative of the licensed market was present to share data or industry context. Also notably absent, ANJL pointed out, was the Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas (SPA), the Finance Ministry body actually responsible for regulating and overseeing the sector and the entity with the clearest technical picture of both the regulated market’s safeguards and its enforcement work against illegal operators.
ANJL president Plínio Lemos Jorge — whose own background moving from tax law and the judiciary into representing operators has shaped a fairly institutional, process-focused style of advocacy — argued that any serious discussion of betting’s effects needs to include the people actually working inside the regulated framework, given the data and technical expertise they hold. His broader point is procedural rather than defensive: Brazil’s betting law passed Congress after extensive public and institutional debate, and ANJL says it has consistently engaged with that process directly, including working with the SPA on the safeguards that now define the regulated market — problem-gambling prevention, over-indebtedness protections, minor-access controls, responsible advertising and operator oversight. The association’s argument is that those are precisely the protections that distinguish licensed operators from the illegal market, and that a debate about tightening the sector’s rules is more likely to strengthen those protections if it’s built on the input of the people already implementing them, rather than developed without them at the table.
ANJL also flagged a factual concern: it says some of the data on betting’s social impacts presented at the meeting doesn’t match figures from official sources — an issue the association argues is more likely to surface and get corrected in a debate that includes industry data alongside critical voices, rather than one that hears only one side.
ANJL’s statement also pointed to the regulated sector’s broader footprint — hundreds of thousands of jobs, a wide services and investment chain, and contributions to sport, culture, telecommunications, media and public revenue — as context for why it sees exclusion from this kind of conversation as a genuine gap rather than a minor oversight. The association says it remains committed to transparent, technical dialogue with the federal government and the SPA, framing its objection not as opposition to scrutiny of the sector but as a push for that scrutiny to be built on complete information. ANJL says it will formally request a follow-up meeting that includes industry participation, arguing that a fuller debate — one weighing both the sector’s real challenges and the protective framework already in place — would better serve the policy outcomes the government says it wants.
