The National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) of Brazil has published a “Request for Information”. This calls on consultants and other expert organisations to submit their contributions to the “Structuring of the Fixed Odds Lottery Project (Sports Betting)”.
The plan
The Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) is the main financing agent for development in Brazil. They offer various different financial support mechanisms to Brazilian companies of all sizes as well as public administration entities, enabling investments in all economic sectors. This allows Brazil to keep up with an ever-globalising world.
This move by the BNDES was taken alongside the Secretariat of Evaluation, Planning, Energy, and Lottery (SECAP), which comes under the Ministry of Economy. They wanted to understand which companies would be able to operate in the Brazilian market so that they could shape the ongoing project accordingly.
The process
This call also allows the Brazilian government to promote the process to contract technical services to structure the sports betting concession/authorization project. By promoting the process and contacting the correct technical services, they can understand the size of the sports betting project and will be able to announce the size of the investment, number of licenses, the validity, and the details of the concession model.
The consultants and experts selected for the project by the Brazilian government suggest that they will structure their economic and financial model for legalised betting to include privatization programs, the lottery, and sports betting projects and the people who will take charge of the legal advice for the concessions.
Gambling in Brazil
This is a major move for the Brazilian government, almost all gambling activities have been prohibited in Brazil for over 70 years. Since 1941 the only legal gambling activities available to the population are the lotteries under the state monopoly and horse-race wagering. Due to a loophole in the law that classifies poker as a game of skill and not gambling, poker is also legal.
Gambling regulations in Brazil began to change in 2018, 13,756 created the fixed-odds sports betting lottery method. This allows the Ministry of Economics to regulate it and issue licences. This is what is currently being worked on by the National Bank for Economic and Social Development and the Secretariat of Evaluation, Planning, Energy, and Lottery.
This will provide some much-needed revenue for the country; they were hit hard by a depreciation of the real against the US dollar and an economic recession between 2012 and 2015 and quickly dropped from the world’s sixth-largest economy down to the ninth largest.
The future of gambling in Brazil
The illegal black and grey market gambling sectors in Brazil are still going strong, in fact in 2020, illegal gaming transactions are worth almost double the amount generated by legal gaming which is said to be around R$11.1 billion. These illegal gambling options are risky for the consumer and contribute nothing to the Brazilian economy. Despite the long wait for legalised gambling, it will be great for the economy and the consumer.
