He was the luckiest of all the Romanians for two days. In his pocket, he had a lottery ticket for the 6/49 game, which ticket was worth nearly one million dollars starting Sunday night.
And a three-room flat, too. He had partied for forty-eight hours and told every living soul he could find about his good fortune.
But on Tuesday, his life became a nightmare. He no longer has the ticket, because it was stolen from him and the jackpot goes only to the one who can produce the original piece of paper with the numbers on it.
This is the story told by Stelian Ogica, a man of up to thirty years in age, living in the Berceni neighbourhood in Bucharest.
Now everything is up to the police, which has to check Ogica’s statement. In the mean time, the investigators requested Loteria Nationala (the National Lottery) to freeze the payment for the winning ticket until the investigation is over.
Ogica went to the 15th Police Precinct of the Bucharest Police Inspectorate claiming he had been beaten by two unidentified people in the building where he lived on Tuesday night, which people stole several lottery tickets from him, among which the winning one. He said that on Tuesday night, he left home with his two brothers.
On the way, he remembered he had forgotten his mobile phone at the flat and went back to get it by himself. When he entered the building, Ogica claims, two unknown people, a man and a woman hit him and took 60 lottery tickets from him, including the one that would have completely changed his life.
He also said that the assailants were “well dressed” and looked like two “professionals” in beating. He thinks that the assailants found out about his luck by tapping his phone.
As requested by the police officers, Stelian Ogica went to the National Forensics Medicine Institute to get a certificate required by the investigation. The doctors there said he had been beaten, indeed, and the certificate attesting so was handed in to the investigators.
The investigations are yet to prove that Ogica really had the winning ticket and that it was stolen from him. At the moment, the police are considering ten people who might have known that Ogica was the winner.
Until yesterday, no one had showed up to the National Lottery to collect their money. “We’ve had phone calls, as usual under such circumstances, which the lottery employees could not take into account, which they did not, in the absence of the winner and of the original ticket, as stipulated by Article 57 in the Game Rules,” the Lottery explains.
The organisers of the game say that yesterday they were officially notified of an incident involving the assumed winner, who had allegedly been attacked and robbed of the ticket.
The Article 46 in the Game Rules stipulates that the payment of the jackpot may be suspended by the Lottery only based on an ordinance, resolution or any other document issued by the prosecuting bodies or based on a settlement ruled by the court of law registered at the headquarters of the company.
According to the lawyers, the winner must produce evidence to prove the ticket was his, indeed. In Ogica’s case, the chances for his brothers’ being called to testify are dim. “I am afraid it is extremely difficult to prove that he is the actual owner of the ticket.
He must come up with solid evidence, there must be prints or people to have seen him with the ticket in hand before the robbery occurred.
Until what he complained about is proven to have really happened, the ticket belongs to the one who can produce it,” said Florentin ?uca, senior partner in the Musat&Asociatii (Musat&Associates) law firm.