Brazil's betting groups ask Supreme Court to halt Lula's ban

Justice Luiz Fux received the second petition in three days on Monday afternoon, digitally filed at 15:55 by ANJL and IBJR, the two principal industry associations, asking him to suspend Provisional Measure 1.394/2026 before Congress has had any chance to convert it into law or reject it.

The measure itself arrived without warning. Eighty-five operators had each paid BRL 30 million for their concessions — a combined BRL 2.5 billion in licensing fees handed to a government that then voided the market in a matter of hours. The industry's lawyers describe this as a "sudden extinguishment," which is a careful way of saying the state collected the money and then changed the rules.

The petition layers its remedies in descending order of ambition. A full suspension first. If not that, suspension for currently authorised operators only. If not that, a six-month extension on the deadline provisions, with operators required to file discontinuation plans and ensure bettors can recover their balances. The structure is deliberate: Fux is being offered three off-ramps, which is what you do when you know the court may not be willing to go the full distance but might be willing to go part of it.

The attorney general's office asked for 72 hours to respond before Fux considers any of it. That is not a concession on the merits — the AGU was explicit that the procedural request anticipates no position on the substance — but 72 hours from Monday puts the first possible ruling in early October, which is itself a market-relevant fact.

The number ANJL cites for illegal sites is 833, drawn from a monitoring service whose methodology the petition does not explain and whose institutional backing it does not identify. The newsroom has already reported 428 illegal sites emerging in six days following the ban. The gap between those figures matters less than the direction they point: whichever count is closer to accurate, the regulated market's collapse is accelerating the black market's expansion, and the industry knows that arguing bettor protection undermines the government's stated rationale is the strongest constitutional ground available to them.

The reporting consensus treats this as a story about industry self-interest dressed in constitutional language. That reading is not wrong, but it misses where the legal weight actually sits. Brazil's STF has shown consistent discomfort with provisional measures that bypass the kind of regulatory process the betting sector did, in fact, go through — licensed, fee-paying, operating under frameworks the government itself designed. The proportionality argument, that a total ban was not the least restrictive means of achieving bettor protection, has real traction in a court that takes administrative law seriously. Fux is not being asked to protect gambling companies. He is being asked to rule on whether a government can accept BRL 2.5 billion from regulated businesses and then eliminate their market without a wind-down period, a refund mechanism, or a legislative process.