Brazil keeps its betting secretariat with 100 posts after MP targeting bets

The federal government has decided to keep the Secretariat of Prizes and Bets even after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) signed a Provisional Measure that sets out to end bets. For PSPs and payment teams watching Brazil, the important part is not the politics — it’s that the state is still keeping the enforcement machinery in place.

1. The Secretariat of Prizes and Bets currently has 100 posts and sits under the Ministry of Finance. The ministry said it does not discuss abolishing the unit and said the team has already taken down 56,000 illegal websites.
2. The government has not said whether all 100 posts will be kept or whether staff will be reassigned. It also has not explained how the secretariat will operate if bets are prohibited under the new measure.
3. Members of the secretariat take part in a committee set up to police illegal betting advertising. The committee is coordinated by the Casa Civil and includes 15 representatives from different government bodies, among them the Presidency’s Communication Secretariat and the ministries of Justice, Finance and Sport.
4. Internally, the secretariat is split into three subsecretariats: authorization, monitoring and enforcement, and sanctioning action. Under the decree that created it, the authorization subsecretariat is responsible for reviewing operating requests and proposing criteria for the licenses issued by the ministry.
5. The Secretariat of Prizes and Bets was created in 2024, when betting houses were regulated in Brazil. So the infrastructure is still young, but it is already being used for enforcement, licensing, and ad policing — which is exactly the sort of machinery that matters when a market is being opened, closed, or squeezed.