Electronic betting has spread rapidly in recent days, according to operators thanks to the football World Cup being held in Qatar. Thousands of avid bettors have one eye on the TV and the other on their cell phones.
It turns out that the market still lacks regulation, which opens up space for opportunists and, above all, for the evasion of foreign exchange from Brazil, since a good part of the servers of these companies are headquartered in other countries.
President Jair Bolsonaro had in his hands the possibility of changing this scenario and removing the market from 'limbo', but he has chosen to turn a blind eye to the sector's regulation project. Sports betting, formally known as fixed-odds betting, was legalized after the enactment of Law 13,756, in December 2018, during the government of Michel Temer.
The law stipulated a period of two years, extendable for another two years, for the activity to be regulated. This deadline expired last Monday (12), leaving businessmen in the sector apprehensive – the document on the regulation of the sector has been on Bolsonaro’s desk since mid-July.
According to a source close to the current President of the Republic, there is a possibility that Bolsonaro will dispatch the demand throughout the week. Until further notice, the market remains irregular. “This is a public service. You cannot enter automatically. It lacks regulation,” he says, warning of the risk of judicialization of the subject. “There is a liability risk.”
Lawyer Caio Loureiro, a partner at TozziniFreire Advogados, warns that several companies are already studying legal measures, but that the idea of the sector is to understand whether the elected government, of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will pay attention to the issue.
“The most likely thing to happen now is an injunction, which is a specific action designed to protect someone who has a right guaranteed by the Constitution or by the Law and is unable to fully exercise that right due to government omission, which is what happens in this case,” he says.
“Some companies are already thinking about a legal measure if this situation lasts for a long time. It is possible that companies will speed up an eventual judicial measure, but they must wait for a position from the new government regarding the decree or not,” adds the lawyer.
For André Gelfi, managing partner of Betsson Brasil, the Bolsonaro government is signing a “certificate of irresponsibility” by ignoring market regulation. “It is an unusual question. It is a testament to irresponsibility. It is a presidential decree to solve all the penalties so that this collection becomes viable in Brazil, so that we have the proper inspection controls and so that this market can be purified,” he says.
“Today, we have the serious operators, the not so serious ones and the bad guys, and they're all mixed up. There is a developed market. We are not talking about creating something, but about formalizing and organizing an existing sector. The population is at the mercy of this unregulated activity,” says Gelfi.
Estimates show that the World Cup will move more than R$ 20 billion (US$ 3.8b) in bets in the country.
Source: Veja
