Brazil finance minister wants tobacco playbook for gambling

• Finance Minister Dario Durigan says President Lula would have preferred to end betting outright.
• Government data shows over 5 million Brazilians now barred or self-excluded from regulated platforms.
• Durigan likens betting policy to cigarette taxation, ruling out an outright ban.

Brazilian Finance Minister Dario Durigan said President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would have ended betting altogether if the decision were his alone, as new government data shows more than 5 million Brazilians have now been blocked or excluded from regulated platforms.

Durigan made the remarks in an interview with Rádio Metrópole da Bahia on Friday, a conversation later picked up and reported in full by Metrópoles.

Dario Durigan, Brazil’s Finance Minister, said:

“President Lula says he doesn’t like betting and, if it were up to him, he would have ended betting.”

He said his own feelings run in the same direction, going further later in the broadcast:

“My position is against gambling. I don’t like gambling.”

Even so, Durigan argued that outright prohibition carries its own risk: a legal market simply dissolving into an unregulated one. He framed the government’s task as narrower than a ban, saying the country needs to be “responsible about building a path of rigor and enforcement, without incentivizing the illegal market.”

Where the numbers come from

Durigan broke down how the government arrives at its 5 million figure.

The largest share, roughly 3 million people, are recipients of the Bolsa Família welfare program and the Continuous Benefit Payment (BPC), blocked through their tax ID. Another 800,000 entered the total through Desenrola, a federal debt-renegotiation program that bars betting for six months as a condition of enrollment.

The remaining 1.2 million opted in voluntarily through the self-exclusion tool the Ministry of Finance launched in December 2025. Add the three groups together and Durigan puts the total at just over 5 million people now shut out of every licensed betting site and app in the country.

A market built on gaps

Durigan’s broader argument was about timing. Digital betting became legal in 2018 under Michel Temer, but Brazil went five years without a working rulebook, he said, before comprehensive regulation finally arrived in 2023 under Lula.

Durigan said:

“We had to start work back in 2023 to end the anarchy left by the Temer and Bolsonaro governments.”

In that gap, he argued, betting brands built themselves into the fabric of Brazilian football, advertising, broadcast media and Congress, which is precisely what makes the sector so hard to unwind now.

Enforcement has kept pace with that argument: regulators moved against Pixbet earlier this month, and separate rules now put financial institutions on the hook for facilitating illegal gambling.

Tobacco as the template

Rather than prohibition, Durigan pointed to Brazil’s tobacco policy as the model he’d rather follow: steadily rising taxes and tightening restrictions that shrink a habit without banning it outright.

Durigan said:

“We have to treat betting like cigarettes, which have high taxation.”

He credited that approach with Brazil’s long decline in smoking rates, and said he expects a similar trajectory for gambling if the government keeps turning the same levers. Several are already in motion.

Betting ads now carry tobacco-style health warnings, and bettors have paid a 15% income tax on net winnings above an annual threshold since the regulated market launched on January 1, 2025.

A separate proposal to tax player deposits directly, the CIDE-Bets measure, was stripped from legislation in February, though lawmakers have signaled a standalone version could resurface.

Licensed operators are left chasing a shrinking pool of legal bettors, one the government is trimming on purpose. Every person pushed off Bolsa Família or into Desenrola is a customer illegal sites would happily take instead, tax-free and unchecked.

Durigan’s own words hint he’s aware of the trade-off: rigor with nowhere for displaced bettors to go is, by his own definition, the anarchy he says he’s trying to end.