Amid economic hardship, winners rejoice in $3b jackpot

[Sephiroth]

Amid economic hardship, winners rejoice in $3b jackpot
AP December 23, 201212:50AM

Carmen, centre hugs her daughter Azahara, right, and an unidentified cousin after winning the main Christmas lottery prize El Gordo ("The Fat One") in Alcala de Henares, just outside Madrid. Source: AP

WINNERS of Spain's cherished Christmas lottery - the world's richest - have celebrated in more than a dozen locations where lucky tickets were sold, a moment of uplift for a country enduring another brutal year of economic hardship.

Initial reports said there were winners of the maximum prize of 400,000 euros ($507,000) in 15 towns or cities. In Madrid, two lottery outlet workers who sold top-prize tickets celebrated with sparkling wine as curious neighbours gathered. The fortunate winner had yet to make an appearance.

The lottery sprinkled a treasure chest of 2.5 billion euros ($3.17 billion) in prize money around the country.

Unlike lotteries that generate a few big winners, Spain's version - now celebrating its 200th anniversary - has always shared the wealth more evenly instead of concentrating on vast jackpots, so thousands of tickets yield some kind of return.

Almost all of Spain's 46 million inhabitants traditionally watch at least some part of the live TV coverage showing school children singing out winning numbers for the lottery known as El Gordo ("The Fat One".)

It is so popular that frequently three 20 euro ($25) tickets are sold for every Spaniard and many consider lottery day as the unofficial kickoff of the holiday season.

Before Spain's property-led economic boom collapsed in 2008 ticket buyers often yearned to win so they could buy a small apartment by the beach or a new car. Now people said they needed money just to get by, or to avoid being evicted from their homes.

Though ticket sales were down 8.3 per cent on last year, according to the National Lottery, in the days preceding the draw hundreds of people line up to buy tickets outside outlets that have sold winning tickets before.

Madrid's Dona Manolita lottery store in Madrid is renowned for being particularly lucky and queues there sometimes go round the block. Unemployed construction company office manager Miguel Angel Ruiz drove 165 kilometres to the shop to buy tickets for a pool of players including his wife and relatives.

"We're buying more hoping we'll hit it so we can emerge from poverty," said Ruiz, 39. "Before the crisis, lottery winnings were to buy an apartment or a car, and now it's to pay debts."

Since so many people chip in to buy tickets in groups, top prizes frequently end up being handed out in the same small town or in one city neighbourhood. Last year's top winning number hit for 1800 tickets in the northern town of Granen, population 2000. Townspeople shared about 700 million euros ($888 million), and the rest of the 1.8 billion euros was doled out in smaller prizes around Spain.

The December 22 lottery began in 1812 and last year sold an estimated 2.7 billion euros in tickets with per-capita spending of about 70 euro just for the Christmas lottery.

Spain holds another big lottery on January 6 to mark the Feast of the Epiphany. It is known as El Nino ("The Child"), in reference to the baby Jesus.

But the crisis will hit El Nino and all lotteries going forward. Until now, lottery winnings have been free from taxation, but now prizes above 2000 euros will be liable to a 20 per cent tax in 2013.

The government has imposed stinging austerity measures this year in a bid to prevent Spain from asking for a full-blown bailout like those granted to Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus. Spain's unemployment stands at 25 per cent and its economy is sinking into a double-dip recession.

 

[Boba Fett]

How 'El Gordo' changed our lives: inside the Spanish village where everyone was a winner

This time last year, an entire village in Spain won the Christmas lottery jackpot. Twelve months later, they tell Harriet Alexander how their lives have changed - and why the Jaguar salesman went away disappointed.

People celebrate having won a portion of the winning lottery number in Spain's Christmas lottery 'El Gordo' in Granen, northern Spain, December 2011. In the nearby village of Sodeto, every inhabitant had bought a ticket - except for one man. Photo: EPA

By Harriet Alexander, Sodeto

2:30PM GMT 22 Dec 2012

Samuel Penella was on his tractor when he heard the news.

It took several phone calls to convince him, but once he realised it was true he zoomed back into the village, parked his grain trailer in a rush, and ran as fast as he could to the central plaza.

Sandra Garcia was sat behind her desk when she heard the news. Trembling with shock, she was sent home early by her boss, who realised she would be of little use at work for the rest of the afternoon.

Several days previously she had written on her Facebook page: "I have bought a lottery ticket. And this year we are going to win."

Now it had happened - not just to her, though, but everyone in her home village.

Last year the entire population of Sodeto, a remote Spanish farming community, won the lottery jackpot. A year ago on Saturday, the children who sing out the numbers in Spain's annual Christmas draw – the world's biggest lottery prize fund, named "El Gordo", or the fat one – were singing a song for Sodeto.

In this tiny village in the Arizona-like landscape of the plains between Madrid and Barcelona, all 250 inhabitants had bought a ticket, taking a varying share of the €120 million top prize - ranging from €100,000 to €1 million each.

All of the inhabitants, that is, except one.

Costas Mitsotakis, a Greek film maker who had moved to the village outskirts seven years ago after falling in love with a local woman, was the only resident who didn't buy a ticket. Being Greek, he was less attuned to the Spanish obsession with El Gordo, and his house lies just beyond the centre where locals had gone door to door selling tickets.

"My first reaction was, 'That's nice for them,'" said Mr Mitsotakis, 43, from Athens. "I didn't quite realise how enormous a deal it was.

"I drove into town and the whole place was going crazy. So I went home to get my camera, and started filming."

Mr Mitsotakis is now making a documentary about the win, Cuando Toco, ("When Touched"), and is remarkably sanguine about the fact that he alone missed out.

"I suppose if I had been planning on buying a ticket and didn't then I would be freaking out. But the Housewives' Association who sell the tickets didn't come this far out, so I didn't buy one," he said. "I'm not upset."

His co-producer on the film, Lars Tang Sorensen, who travelled to Sodeto on reading about the project, added: "I keep on expecting Costis to get angry, to let the façade slip and confess that actually he's really furious and suicidal or something. But he's genuinely not. I don't know anyone else who could take it so calmly."

Back in the village, however, the scene was anything but calm. The communal rejoicing was a rare break from what have otherwise been grim financial years for most Spaniards, with unemployment at record levels thanks to the Eurozone crash.

Mr Penalla, 19, a farmer, was dancing for joy on top of a tractor trailer, leaping up and down in a pile of grain.

Miss Garcia was turning her house upside down in a hysterical search for her lottery ticket, buried among piles of papers in her house. Many people couldn't remember how many tickets they had bought, although each was worth €100,000 and some had bought up to ten. The tickets all carried a winning number that the Housewives' Association, which sold them, had been allocated.

Marisol, the village hairdresser, whose husband had announced to her that morning: "We're going to win today", was besieged by women who wanted their hair coiffing for the flood of television cameras that were pouring into the village. "Not today," she told them. "There is no way I'm working."

Within hours, bank representatives were also in the plaza, prowling for business. And soon the village was soon plastered with flyers offering everything from villas on the beach to top-of-the-range Bang and Olufsen sound systems and home furnishings. Miss Garcia was bemused by firm advice to buy gold.

One enterprising vendor drove a €200,000 Jaguar into the square, and parked it prominently to entice the local buyers. But he was dismayed when a villager's response was: "What would I do with that? I'd rather have a new tractor."

And that has largely been the response of the Sodeto's villagers as a whole, confounding, perhaps, the spendthrift image that southern Europe has gained in the wake of the Eurozone crash.

Few have chosen to lash out on lavish homes or fast cars. Instead, most have simply renovated their existing houses, bought more land or invested in new farming machinery - pointing out that their winnings, though most welcome, were not enough to allow people to stop work for ever. One man did go on holiday to Italy - but returned vowing never to travel again, describing it as "exhausting".

"We are the same as we always were – except now we sleep better at night," said the mayor, Rosa Pons Serena.

There has, inevitably, been some tension behind closed doors. Squabbles have broken out between relatives over how to spend the family fortune. Some have been envious of their neighbours, who invested more and so won a larger slice of the cash.

But given the scale of the win, and the fact that it is the first time in El Gordo's 200 year history that one entire village has won, the tensions have been remarkably slight.

Few in the village will confess to exactly how much they won. But Mrs Pons has paid off her mortgage, and says she can refuel her car without looking at the cost. People buy the sofa they like, rather than merely the one they can afford, she says.

"I see this money as a recompense for those who had faith in our village," she said. "We were living through a really difficult moment when we won.

"All the farmers were being forced by law to install new irrigation systems, and so had taken out huge bank loans to pay for it. Some were thinking seriously of selling up and leaving. So this is a prize for those who rolled up their sleeves and fought for this community."

Hermina Gayan, 78, was one of the first people to move into the village when was built on Franco's orders in 1959, in an attempt to repopulate sparsely-habited rural areas. Almost everyone is related in some way, with most people descended from seven original families who moved here.

"It's a beautiful thing to know that my grandchildren can choose to stay here," she said, sitting in her vivid pink-painted kitchen, with its slick new chrome kitchen appliances, "because now there is a future for the village."

Miss Garcia, 36, who won €100,000, bought a new car and gave her old one to Mr Mitsotakis, the film maker. And when the marketing firm that employs her wanted to make people redundant, she offered to reduce her hours and prevent others losing their jobs.

She is one of the few villagers who has experienced life beyond the tiny Spanish village – living for years in London, New York and Athens. But she can understand why none of the people in this dusty three-street town, without a school and with only one bar and one shop, have moved out.

"I always felt that if you travel more, you learn more," she said, curled up on the sofa of her converted barn, which she has now modelled into an airy open-plan living space, with two roaring log burners.

"But the people here are happy with what they know."

Among the few people to treat themselves were Marie Carmen Lambea, 54, and her husband Joaquin, 63. A pair of shining new Harley Davidson motorbikes sit inside their garage, and a burgundy BMW four-wheel drive is parked outside their house.

It was Mrs Lambea who chose the numbers that the Homeowners Association would sell. "I flicked through several sets of numbers before settling on ours," she said. "And I'm very glad I did."

Along with most of the Sodeto residents, Mr Lambea bought more lottery tickets this year, convinced the village was blessed. This year's allocation of tickets – three times as many as last year – sold out in October. And on Saturday the villagers crowded into the bar with long lists of numbers, watching intently as the winning numbers were sung out during the four-hour must-watch television show.

This year's total prize fund was more than €2 billion - although for the first time, this year it was taxed.

Hadn't Mr Penalla, who bought a new tractor, been tempted to have fun with his money - a trip to the bright lights of Madrid, perhaps, to see what his new wealth might buy?

"No way!" he said, with a huge smile. "This is home. I'm staying here. We're all staying here."