WEDNESDAY, September 14th 2011
National News n 05
news Your outlook on the World
the
National lottery up for grabs
N
EWS IN BRIEF
Got a story? Got pictures? Send your stories or pictures to The News
editorial@thenewsonline.es
TARRAGONA
Not €7.5 but €33 million! A pensioner went along to a lottery outlet mid-week, thinking he’d won €7.5, having checked that Sunday’s Primitiva Gordo on the internet. But he’d entered the numbers incorrectly and found himself €33.024.545 richer instead. It was the biggest individual win ever paid out by the Primitiva lottery. The pensioner had spent €6 on four lines of numbers and had been walking around for four days with the ticket in his pocket. The lottery office staff said later: “we were more nervous than he was.”
The privatisation of one of the most famous lotteries in the world – the stateowned Loterías y Apuestas del Estado which hands out an estimated €2.3 MADRID Spaniards rank high on piracy billion a year in prizes – began in London on Tuesday. The float was led by a quartet of investment banks – UBS, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Cazenove and Goldman Sachs – along with Spain's BBVA and Santander, and a host of rival City firms including Citi, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Barclays are also hoping to get a piece of the winnings. Loterías could become the world's largest listed gaming company by value, if the offer is successful. It has 10,500 distribution points in Spain – the world's fourth largest lottery market after China,
the US and Italy. Along with the UK's Camelot and France's Française des Jeux, Loterías runs EuroMillions, but its most famous payout is El Gordo, the world-record-breaking prize fund in Spain's 199year-old Christmas lottery which shelled out € 2.3 billion in December. Come civil war, hell or high water, El Gordo has taken place on December 22nd every year since 1812. It can create up to 390 millionaires at a time. The game was started as a fundraiser for orphans, and the procedure
followed for the draw has not varied since it began, when the orphans themselves pulled the numbers. Today, Madrid schoolchilden have replaced the orphans in a modernised version of the draw which is shown live on national TV. It is a true lottery, not a lotto, in which players pick a combination of numbers. El Gordo tickets come with the numbers pre-printed. Ticket numbers range from 0 to 84,999, and many players
go for significant dates or numbers when choosing a ticket. In 2009, for example, tickets printed with the numbers forming the date of Michael Jackson's death – 25609 – were heavily sought after. Last year, the winning number was 79.250, and many of the winners were thought to be fans of Barcelona football club, who had opted to buy tickets ending in the numbers five and zero in order to celebrate their team's 5-0 victory over arch-rivals Real Madrid last season.
www.markdentalclinic.com
Just over 13 per cent of Spaniards always use pirated software programmes on their computers and another 37 per cent “almost always”, according to the latest study by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a worldwide association representing 100 companies. In Europe, only the Poles and the Czechs use more pirated software, while China is the world leader. Paradoxically, nearly three quarters of the people questioned in 32 countries said they believed in intellectual property rights and preferred legal software. MADRID
House sales still falling In the second quarter of this year, house sales were down 40 per cent over the same period last year, according to figures from the Public Works Ministry, which is the biggest drop since 2004. Overall figures for the first six months of this year show that just over 165,285 houses and apartments were sold, compared to 260,243 for the same period last year and more than 400,000 for the same period in 2007 before the construction bubble burst.