Galassi Took ABRAS Numbers to the STF, but They Do Not Support the Claim Against Betting

At a public hearing before Justice Luiz Fux on MP 1.394, ABRAS president João Carlos Galassi argued that fixed-odds betting should stay prohibited in Brazil. The problem for the supermarket lobby is that the figures it cites do not show what it wants them to show — and the biggest number in the speech, a claimed R$ 50 billion loss in food spending, does not line up with official data.

1. Galassi appeared before the Supremo Tribunal Federal on Tuesday (3/11) in the hearing on ADI 8027, saying President Lula had made a “courageous decision” by issuing MP 1.394/2026, which banned fixed-odds betting in the country. He also said that “food is returning to workers’ tables.”
2. BNLData checked the 11 main claims in his speech. Some of them are based on real data — the decline in Pix, the return of balances, the Febrafar survey — but none of them proves the point ABRAS is trying to make: that the end of betting drove supermarket sales higher.
3. The headline numbers in the ABRAS/NielsenIQ survey are real: sales were up 6.5% in the week of October 5 to 11 and 6.3% in the week of October 12 to 18, compared with the same periods in 2025. The catch is attribution. ABRAS vice president Márcio Milan told Folha on 29/10 that the method is to compare against the historical series and that “the only thing different was the betting ban.”
4. Three factors совпided with the measurement window and were not controlled for: the deadline for bettors to withdraw balances ended at 23:59 on October 5, right before the first measured week; before the MP, balances totalled about R$ 2.1 billion, according to the Fazenda; and between October 9 and 14, banks returned about R$ 1.3 billion to 26.5 million bettors, which fell squarely inside the two weeks being measured.
5. Calendar effects also matter. Dia das Crianças in 2026 fell on a Monday (12/10), creating a long holiday weekend, while in 2025 it fell on a Sunday. Year-over-year comparison makes the result look stronger than it may be in a normal week-to-week reading.
6. The scale issue is the part that really breaks the argument. ABRAS says the food retail sector had revenue of R$ 1.145 trillion in 2025, or about R$ 22 billion per week. A 6.5% increase works out to roughly R$ 1.4 billion more in a single week. By comparison, the GGR of regulated betting — the net loss of all bettors combined — was R$ 36.9 billion, which is smaller than the R$ 50 billion in food spending ABRAS tried to attach to the betting ban.

For PSPs and acquirers watching Brazil, the useful takeaway is not the political theater. It is that the numbers used to justify payment bans are being stress-tested in public, and the methodological gap between “sales went up” and “betting caused it” matters when regulators, courts, and banks decide what to do next.