FEBRALOT met in Brasília with authorities of the Caixa and Ministry of Finance on March 16 to defend interests of the loteries sector, among them the remuneration of internet lottery bettings, government investments in advertising, values transportation and other topics relevant to the sector.
The most discussed issue with Caixa was, as expected, the question of the remuneration of physical stores for bets placed on the Internet. The CEF defends that the minimum bet is R$ 20.00 (US$ 6.45, with payment by credit card) and that the bettor indicates the lottery to be remunerated. The entity is against the indication and defends that the fairer way of remuneration is the proportional distribution to the representativity of the lottery revenues in the collection of bets. That is, if a physical lottery raises X % of game sales in its store, it should keep X % of sales of games made through the internet.
In addition, lottery retailers claim that the minimum bet is R$ 50 (US$ 16.2) for bets via the Internet, since they have felt for some time the decrease in public betting in stores and fear that the ease of the internet will keep on reducing the affluence of public. Another concern is the remuneration of lottery retailers in online betting, still without a defined percentage.
Another demand was the renewal of the lottery products and the increase of the investment in advertising to reverse the picture of fall in the collection, which in 2016 was bigger than the previous year. Since advertising is linked to 1% of the lottery fund (FDL), only raising the revenue will allow more investment in this area.
FEBRALOT representatives also met with technicians from the Ministry of Finance, asking for more attention to the IT area of CEF, because of the difficulties of lottery in technology advances and the releasing of new betting modalities.
Lottery retailers are also calling for more vigilance against illegal gambling, "which removes revenue that may be directed to our products." The industry was given a direct communication channel for complaints.
As there are other demands, such as debt repricing, CEF said
that this month will release an emergency loan for the sector. Regarding the
other items of a broader discussion proposal, a new meeting is scheduled in
Brasília on next April 5th with representatives of the parliamentary front that
defends the interests of the lottery sector with the objective of scheduling a
public hearing with all the areas involved to solve the problems that still
affect the activity.
In a final message, FEBRALOT affirms that it "is made up of lottery retailer.
Most of them depend on their stores for their survival, and we have an
extremely difficult time. We believe that this does not harm the already
sacrificed network. Unfortunately, the time Caixa needs to meet our demands is
much higher than necessary for the Network to not fall in financially bankrupt.
And if there is not a clear feedback to our requests, we will need to go in
search of other ways to solve our problems."
Source: GMB
