Brazil’s AGU asks the Supreme Court to strike down both betting laws in ADI 7749 after defending them in 2024

Brazil’s Attorney General’s Office (AGU) has reversed its position on fixed-odds betting and asked the Supreme Federal Court (STF) to declare the legal framework unconstitutional. For PSPs and operators, the useful part is not the politics; it is that the government now says the current regime is “extensively flawed” after previously telling the court to wait and monitor it.

1. The filing was submitted at 4:22 p.m. on Friday (2) in ADI 7749, one of six betting-related cases being reported by Justice Luiz Fux. In the new brief, AGU chief Jorge Messias asks the STF to invalidate the fixed-odds betting framework entirely.
2. This is a clear shift from what Messias said on November 11, 2024, at the public hearing in ADI 7721. Back then, he told Fux: “I believe we are facing a dragon, and our challenge here is to try to tame it.” The AGU’s position at the time was that Law 14.790/2023 was “still constitutional,” but heading toward “progressive unconstitutionality” as the government monitored how it worked in practice.
3. The new filing says the monitoring period has now passed: “The period of monitoring deemed imperative has elapsed.” It also says the earlier expectation that the law’s weaknesses could be filtered out “did not materialize in practice,” and concludes that the betting regime under both laws was “extensively flawed.”
4. The request covers articles 29 to 35 of Law 13.756/2018 and articles 1 to 21, 22 to 24, 25 to 40, 43 to 48 and 54 of Law 14.790/2023. In 2024, AGU had warned that striking down only the 2023 law would leave the activity alive under the 2018 law, creating “an even more serious scenario.” Now it wants both frameworks gone.
5. One factual wrinkle matters for anyone tracking regulatory timelines: the AGU says the regulated market “entered into operation since 2024,” but the regulated market actually began on January 1, 2025, as the Treasury Ministry and PGFN told the STF at the hearing. By that count, the “reasonable” monitoring period lasted 21 months.

For high-risk payments, the more actionable detail is the scale of the unlicensed market. The AGU says the illegal share is estimated at between 41% and 51% of the total, with the illicit and regulated segments operating at “equivalent dimensions.” It also says building a clandestine platform costs about R$ 10,000, which helps explain why enforcement “acted on the effects, not on the cause.”