Brazil’s betting ban defence reached the STF without the regulator, and the numbers did not help

A public hearing before Justice Luiz Fux on Tuesday (3) was meant to give the Brazilian government technical evidence for Medida Provisória 1.394/2026. Instead, the hearing in ADI 8.027 exposed a basic problem for the defense of the MP that banned bets’ operations and advertising in the country: the regulator was absent, and the government leaned on rhetoric instead of official data.

1. The missing voice was the Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas (SPA-MF), the Ministry of Finance unit that regulated, authorised, supervised and monitored the market for 22 months. That is the office that holds the data on bettors, GGR, self-exclusion, blocked illegal sites and tax collection. If the government wanted to show the Supreme Federal Court that regulation failed, that was the place to start.
2. Instead, the Finance Ministry sent Rodrigo Toneto, undersecretary for fiscal policy. He argued that regulation, while increasing oversight, was not enough to contain economic, social and public health harms. He did not present a single regulatory indicator to support that claim.
3. The omission matters because BNLData obtained, through Brazil’s Access to Information Law, the SPA-MF’s Periodic Panorama for Q1 2026, a report that had been completed but not published. The SPA’s own official data show GGR of R$ 36,9 billion in 2025 and R$ 20,07 billion in the first half of 2026. Those are the numbers that undercut much of the arithmetic used to justify the MP.
4. Toneto filled the gap with language rather than evidence, comparing betting to a “pandemic” and saying that “life is above the profit of a few” and that the popular economy should prevail over that of the privileged. The issue for operators and PSPs is not the metaphor itself; it is that the state spent 22 months as architect, regulator and collector in the same market it now says it had to stop.
5. Attorney General Jorge Messias went further, saying regulation had not contained the damage and that the state has a duty to act when protection mechanisms prove insufficient. In other words, the government’s case was that the State had tried, failed and therefore needed a ban — but the regulatory body with the actual numbers was not there to test that story in court.

For high-risk payment providers, the practical signal is straightforward: when a jurisdiction moves from regulation to prohibition, the debate often turns less on compliance mechanics than on how much official evidence the government can put in front of a court. In this hearing, the evidence side was thin, and the regulator was not in the room.