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Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has declared that he will end gambling “once and for all” if a forthcoming regulation of online betting platforms does not “produce results”.
Speaking to Brazilian reporters while on the campaign trail ahead of municipal elections, Lula said that regulations for online betting should be ready by next week, referencing the enforcement deadline to shut down all but 93 pending licence applicants included on a whitelist published by regulators last week.
“In October, we will remove at least 2,000 betting sites from this country, and then we will know what benefits the regulation will bring, I am sure that this is being done seriously,” Lula said. “If the regulation does not produce results, I will have no doubts about ending it once and for all. No doubts at all.”
However, in the same commentary, Lula acknowledged the difficulty of stopping gambling in Brazil, saying that most of the country gambled.
“You will never stop the Brazilian people from gambling,” he acknowledged. “Cockfighting is prohibited in this country, and you know that there are cockfights. I don’t want to stop people from gambling, because people all over the world like to gamble.”
His comments align with a series of recent media comments made by the chief sponsor of legislation to also authorise land-based gambling in Brazil, who has said many times now that the government recognises that gambling is going to happen and therefore should be regulated.
Lula’s comments come in the wake of public and media concern over recent surveys that estimated that Brazilians were spending inordinate sums gambling in the past year.
Some were particularly worried that Bolsa Familia allowances, which are awarded to those in poverty, were being used to gamble online.
Lula himself said he does not believe that to be the case, reasoning that “it is quite possible that someone is doing this, but it is important to remember that often the person who receives Bolsa Família is the woman, and it is unlikely that a woman will spend her child's money gambling on anything else”.
The President was widely reported to be preparing to announce new restrictions for online betting last week. However, Lula instead said he would wait until the website blocking is complete and different government ministries have cooperated over new ordinances.
Industry observers noted that Lula's comments were made while the President was in election campaign mode rather than as some kind of policy announcement specific to gambling, and it is far from clear that imposing a prohibition on online betting is a policy actually under serious consideration at this stage.
Theoretically, however, Lula could "end gambling" by issuing a provisional measure emergency decree revoking the authorisation of fixed-odds lottery games, according to Brazilian gaming lawyer Luiz Felipe Maia.
Lula has, after all, done so once before.
During his first term as President in 2004 and mired in controversy, Lula issued a decree banning "all forms of bingo games and electronic machines" in a special edition of the Brazilian government's official gazette.
At the time, their regulation was on the legislative agenda at his request. Lula backpedalled when his Worker's Party was accused of being financially linked to illegal gambling.
Additional reporting by James Kilsby.
