Brazil Government Keeps Studies Behind MP das Bets Under Seal as Sports Ministry Says It Was Not Consulted

Forty days after Medida Provisória nº 1.394/2026 banned fixed-odds betting and online games in Brazil, the Lula government has not released a single technical study explaining the decision. For PSPs, the important part is not the politics: it is that the legal and regulatory record behind a sweeping market ban is now split between two layers of secrecy.

1. Casa Civil denied freedom-of-information requests from BBC News Brasil and Amado Mundo on 29 October. The Special Secretariat for Legal Affairs (SAJ) said it prepared a legal opinion on the MP, but argued that the opinion itself, statements from other agencies, and minutes from meetings with consulted sectors are covered by attorney-client privilege under Brazil’s Statute of the Bar Association.
2. Casa Civil went further and said that all other documents in the administrative process were sent to the SAJ to support the legal position, so they would be covered by the same protection. In practice, that means the underlying studies can disappear from public view once they pass across a public lawyer’s desk.
3. The Ministry of Justice took a different route: according to JOTA, it classified as reserved for five years all documents used to formulate the MP. The classification order was signed by Victor Fernandes, Secretary of Digital Rights, on 24 September, one day after the meeting at the Palácio da Alvorada where Lula made the final call and one day before the MP was published in the Diário Oficial da União.
4. The justification in that order is unusual even by government standards. The ministry said disclosure would put at risk the life, safety, or health of the population and would create, in its words, an “elevated risk to the financial, economic or monetary stability of the country.” The government framed the prohibition as a public-health and family-protection measure; now it says the basis for that measure is too dangerous to be seen.
5. The Ministry of Sport gave the clearest answer of all: it said it was not consulted on the impact of the measure on the fight against match-fixing and has no study on the topic. That matters because the MP created a “duty of care” regime for application providers, app stores, and operating systems, and the Ministry of Justice is the body tasked with supervising and sanctioning it.

There is also a legal wrinkle that high-risk operators will care about. Decreto nº 7.724/2012, which regulates Brazil’s Access to Information Law, states in Article 20 that preparatory documents used as the basis for an administrative decision can be accessed after the decision is taken unless a specific legal restriction applies. Here, the administration has chosen to hide the very material that led to a market-wide prohibition.