Paraguay Gambling Bill: Regulator Keeps 20% of Licence Fees, Unlicensed Online Gambling Sites Face Immediate Blocking

File photo: Paraguay’s National Congress in Asunción, 2 March 2014. Photo: Diego Fernando Quint… / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Legislative context for the regulatory reform report; not a photograph of the 2026 proposal, a legislative vote or DINAjZAR offices. Source photograph reproduced without alteration; the website displays a cropped thumbnail. Original photo and credit. Rights information.

A regulator keeps 20% of the monthly licence fees collected from the industry it regulates, and retains the fines too. These are the funding sources that a gambling bill under consideration in Paraguay’s Congress proposes for a new National Gambling Directorate (DINAJZAR).

The bill is titled “On Games of Chance and Their Regulation” (De los juegos de azar y su regulación). According to industry outlet SIGMA, it was registered in the Chamber of Deputies in October as file No. 131741, with a covering letter signed by deputies Luis A. Urbieta and Miguel A. Del Puerto and addressed to Chamber of Deputies President Pedro Alliana. The draft text obtained for this article contains 100 articles.

A “Self-Financing” Regulator

Article 11 of the bill establishes DINAJZAR as an “autonomous body” (autárquico), with legal personality under public law and its own assets. It would be linked to the executive branch through the Ministry of Finance and comprise a national director appointed by the president and a “Gambling Policy Council.”

Article 14 lists its sources of assets: 20% of total monthly licence-fee revenue from gambling concessions, including concessions granted by municipalities; proceeds from fines and confiscations; donations; interest; and revenue from selling the right to participate in public tenders.

Article 2 centralises the powers to plan, grant concessions for, supervise and penalise gambling nationwide, covering the departmental and municipal levels, and states that they “may only be exercised through DINAJZAR.” The transitional provisions are substantial too. Article 91 requires operators holding municipal or departmental permits to apply to DINAJZAR for their continuation within 180 days of the law’s promulgation. After that deadline, their permits would expire and they would be “treated as illegal gambling.” Article 90 requires existing concessions issued by CONAJZAR to be brought into line with the new law within 180 days or become void.

Unlicensed Online Gambling: Site Blocking and Criminal Liability

Article 55 of the bill stipulates that, when unauthorised “online” gambling is detected, the competent authority must be asked to block the website “immediately,” while the case is also referred to prosecutors.

The criminal provisions are tougher still. Operating or participating in gambling without DINAJZAR’s authorisation, including organising, promoting or advertising it, would be punishable by six months to five years in prison or a fine of up to 20,000 minimum daily wages. Repeat offences would carry two to eight years in prison or a fine of up to 60,000 daily wages. Administrative penalties are divided into minor, serious and very serious categories, at 60, 150 and 1,000 minimum daily wages respectively. According to SIGMA’s conversion, 20,000 daily wages amount to approximately US$410,000.

At Odds with Existing Law

There are several points in this bill that readers should approach with caution.

First, the institution it seeks to replace has already changed. Law No. 7438/2025, which took effect in January 2025, already made CONAJZAR a body under the National Directorate of Tax Revenue (DNIT). DNIT’s official website shows that, on October 6, it also approved the organisational structure of the “General Directorate of Games of Chance” (DGJA) through Internal Resolution No. 2408, with four departments covering regulatory inspections, technical standards, concessions and legal advice. In other words, just as the government finished building a structure for gambling regulation within the tax system, Congress received a bill seeking to move it out wholesale.

Second, the text bears clear traces of its age. One of the bill’s transitional provisions approves DINAJZAR’s budget for the “2019 fiscal year.” The text repeatedly refers to the “Ministry of Finance” (Ministerio de Hacienda), although that ministry was reorganised into the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) long ago. Its page headers also carry the words “150th Anniversary of the War of the Triple Alliance,” used on official documents by Paraguay’s Congress between 2014 and 2020. This text may well be an old bill resubmitted, and this article cannot confirm whether it is the latest version.

Third, accounts differ over who introduced it. SIGMA says the covering letter was signed by two deputies, but the file information records the executive branch as the proposer. Another industry outlet, Focus Gaming News, reports that the executive submitted a 72-article bill to the Senate through Message No. 416. It entered the Senate on October 12 and was referred to committee on October 14. Those 72 articles do not match the 100 articles seen for this report; the two may be different texts.

Earlier reporting in this series said only that the government was “pushing to establish DINAJZAR to replace CONAJZAR.” It now appears considerably more complicated: this is not merely a change of institutional name, but an attempt to overturn the “tax authority regulates gambling” system established only in 2025, bringing regulatory powers, financial powers and local licensing powers back to the centre together. Whether it can pass depends on who has the final say: Congress or the finance authorities.

Sources

• Draft text (file No. 131741, PDF published by SIGMA): https://images.sigma.world/PROYECTO-131741-paraguay_-dinajzar.pdf
• DNIT announcement of Internal Resolution No. 2408: https://ekuatia.set.gov.py/web/portal-institucional/w/la-dnit-aprueba-estructura-organizacional-de-la-direcci%C3%B3n-general-de-juegos-de-azar
• SIGMA: https://sigma.world/es/news/dinajzar-regulador-juegos-azar-paraguay/
• Focus Gaming News: https://focusgn.com/latinoamerica/paraguay-dinajzar-reforma-regulacion-juego
• SBC Noticias: https://x.com/sbc_noticias/status/2110757584458101070
• Note: This article could not independently verify the file’s status in Paraguay’s Congressional Legislative Information System (SILpy).