The meeting, organized by the Permanent Subcommittee on Sports Betting Regulation, focused on betting on individual events, advertising, and gambling addiction. During his remarks, Pietro emphasized the importance of structuring public policies based on scientific data to ensure effective action against match-fixing, harmful advertising, and, at the same time, strengthen the defense of Responsible Gambling.
“Advertising is a way to inform the consumer. We do not have influencer regulation. Today we have betting influencers who run extremely harmful ads, completely outside the oversight of the market and the State. The SPA does not monitor them. This is a significant issue that we can and need to address, and there is room to include it in the third quarter of this year,” said Pietro Cardia Lorenzoni.
He stressed that the illegal market surpasses the legal one in the country, which represents a major problem. “The legal market collected around R$4 billion (US$736m) in taxes in the first half of the year and contributed to areas such as sports, tourism, public security, social security, education, and health. However, we still lack proper visibility as to whether these resources are actually being used to mitigate the negative externalities of gambling,” he warned.
Illegal market
A week ago, Pietro took part in another public hearing in the House of Representatives. On that occasion, the topic under discussion was the outlook for regulation and the fight against illegal betting. The ANJL representative highlighted that the underground betting market generates a tax revenue loss ranging between R$6 billion and R$8 billion (US$1.1bn / US$1.5bn), in addition to causing over-indebtedness, ruining lives, and allowing children and teenagers access to gambling, something prohibited in the regulated sector.
He also drew attention to the need for the supervision fee to be properly allocated to the Ministry of Finance, warning that otherwise the effectiveness of regulation could be compromised. Another key point was the presentation of proposals to improve the sector’s sustainability.
These include the regulation of technology providers, platforms, and fixed-odds betting, the prevention and repression of the proliferation of illegal websites as well as the payment processes used by these underground operators, and also the use of advertising.
Source: GMB
