Brazil’s Ministry of Finance cancels Fabio Macorin’s trip to the IAGR conference in Lima on the opening day

The Secretariat of Prizes and Bets (SPA-MF), part of Brazil’s Ministry of Finance, has отменed the travel authorizations for two senior officials who were due to attend the IAGR Annual Conference 2026 in Lima, Peru. For high-risk payments people, the useful part is not the travel drama; it is the timing, because one of the officials had just been elected to the board of the international regulators’ association, and the cancellation lands in the middle of Brazil’s latest policy reversal on fixed-odds betting.

1. A dispatch published in the Diário Oficial da União on Monday, 19/10, nullified the previously granted leave for Fabio Augusto Macorin, deputy secretary of SPA-MF, and Leandro dos Reis Lucchesi, the agency’s general coordinator for regulation. The original travel authorizations had been issued on 3 September 2026.
2. Macorin had been scheduled to travel from 18 to 23 October, including transit, to speak on the panel “The Regulator’s Mandate in a Connected Market,” with expenses covered by the Union. Lucchesi’s authorization, tied to the same panel, covered 19 to 23 October. The second dispatch does not give a reason for either cancellation.
3. The cancellation came after Macorin had already been elected in September to the IAGR Board of Directors as the representative for South America. At the time, IAGR president Ben Haden said Brazil had carried out “an ambitious regulatory transformation in an extraordinarily short period,” and that Macorin’s experience would be useful for regulators in the global community.
4. Macorin said after the election that Brazil had learned from regulators around the world while building its regulatory framework, and that fighting the illegal market, preventing money laundering, and protecting consumers requires growing cross-border cooperation. His participation in the Lima conference had been announced by IAGR itself.
5. The election and the travel approvals both came before Provisional Measure No. 1.394, of 25 September 2026, under which the Lula government prohibited fixed-odds betting in Brazil, less than two years after the regulated market started operating in January 2025. That is the key operational fact for PSPs and acquirers: a regulated market that was being presented abroad as a success case was shut down by the same government that had structured it.