ABLE challenges Abras at Brazil’s Supreme Court over the bets ban and food spending

The Brazilian Association of Economic Freedom (ABLE) has pushed back at supermarket lobby data used to defend the ban on online betting in Brazil. For PSPs and high-risk operators, the point is simple: the government’s argument that the bets ban boosted grocery spending is now being contested with a broader data set.

1. At a public hearing at the Supreme Federal Court (STF) on Tuesday (4/11), ABLE said the evidence presented by the Brazilian Supermarkets Association (Abras) does not support the claim that banning online betting increased food consumption in Brazil. The dispute centers on Provisional Measure signed by President Lula on 25 September 2026, which prohibited bets operators from operating in Brazil.
2. Abras had presented its own research, carried out with NielsenIQ, saying food sales rose shortly after the bets veto. The association said purchases increased by 6.5% in the week of 5 to 11 October 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, and by 6.3% in the week of 12 to 18 October. Abras president João Carlos Galassi presented the figures, and Attorney General Jorge Messias used them to defend the ban before the Court.
3. ABLE countered with a study from LCA Consultoria using a longer time window. According to that analysis, food purchases had already been rising since the start of 2026, almost every week in year-on-year comparisons, which weakens the claim that the ban caused the increase. Eric Brasil, an economist and director at LCA who represented ABLE at the hearing, said there was no “correlation or causality” behind the argument that the bets ban stimulated food consumption in the country.
4. Brasil also said household debt has a different explanation: “There is a three-part problem behind this debt issue: extremely high interest rates, abundant easy credit with high interest, and a structural difficulty among families, especially low-income families, with financial education.” For payment providers, this is the policy backdrop now being argued in court: not just gambling regulation, but a broader attempt to link betting flows to consumer stress.
5. The legal fight took another turn on Monday (9/11), when Justice Luiz Fux, the rapporteur in the case challenging Lula’s provisional measure, suspended all proceedings on the matter in the Federal Courts until the STF’s full bench rules on it. That followed a Friday (6/11) move in which federal appeals judge Adriana Pileggi granted an injunction citing “legal uncertainty” around the ban and authorized three bets to operate.