Brazil accelerates sports betting privatization

The Brazilian Board of the Investment Partnerships Program (CPPI) included sports betting during its meeting Wednesday with the presence of President Jair Bolsonaro and Economy Minister Paulo Guedes, who chairs it, to discuss new ventures to be qualified under the program. 

The goal is to seek more efficient models for the provision and management of public services, promoting competition, legal certainty, proposals for regulatory improvements, with a view to attracting national and foreign investors. The federal government is accelerating the privatization process, according to the special secretary of the Investment Partnership Program (PPI) of the Ministry of Economy, Martha Seillier.

At a press conference, she said: “We included in the [PPI] portfolio the lottery called‘ fixed-odds bets’, which is a sports lottery and will be structured so that we can have a concession. As the legislation states for these services, attracting private partners to Brazil to provide this sports lottery service and being able, in view of the existing regulations, to collect taxes and also contribute to this government's fiscal effort in the context of these sports lotteries,” as reported by local news agency BNL. 

The CPPI stated that, considering the existing legal framework allows the operation of the vertical by the private market, privatization aims to relieve the state from acting in an area with a high degree of innovation, and improve the business environment and generate jobs.

The next steps include the amendment of the presidential decree including sports betting in the Investment Partnership Program and designating Brazilian development bank BNDES as responsible for the execution and monitoring of the process, and the Secretariat for Evaluation, Planning, Energy and Lottery of the Ministry of Economy (SECAP/ME) as coordinator of the procedures and stages of the process.

BNDES will be responsible, among other things, for promoting the hiring of consultancy, auditing and other specialized services necessary to carry out privatization. The bank will bid for the hiring of specialized technical services necessary for economic and financial assessment, business plan development and legal advice.

Also, BNDES will be responsible for defining the concession model, the number of licenses and the minimum values for these grants. During the process, public consultation, public hearing, the release of a business plan and publication of notice will be carried out.