Good Lord – you don’t think it was old Helier himself, do you, and he’s been keeping his head down out in The Shed ever since?
The last I heard, whoever it was still hadn’t claimed their prize, and we’re talking telephone numbers here – 162,256,622 euros, to be exact, which is a French record and Europe’s second-highest win ever after the 185 million pocketed by a Scot in July.
Which is also just about the odds against winning.
In fact, talking of telephones, you’ve got as much chance of scooping the jackpot as you have of walking up to a French day-tripper in King Street and correctly guessing what their number is.
If, like me, you’re not a Jersey doctor, lawyer or dentist and can’t get your head round a sum that size, just try to imagine what you could actually do with 162 million.
F’rinstance, you could cough up the annual salary of Yoann Gourcuff, the Breton star of the French Premier League, for the next 36 years, or pay a bread-liner their national minimum for the next 10,000 years.
Then again, you could treat yourself to 13,000 Renault Clios and start a hire car company on The Rock. Or buy one Airbus, or four tons of gold, or 108 villas in the posh and pricey Norman horse-breeding countryside around Deauville, or even 324,000 flat-screen tellies.
Not that all that dosh would necessarily make you any happier, of course. Three years ago a docker down on the Mediterranean near Marseille won a miserable 15 million, the guaranteed minimum jackpot, but he soon went back to work, saying he was bored stiff at home.
Actually, the closest Mme Masstairmann and I ever get to chancing our arm is each chirruping three numbers just for fun when the French Loto draw comes up live on the telly between the main evening news at 8 and Monsieur Météo’s weather forecast, but we’ve never done better than two right in 30 years. Mind you, we’d be a picture if ever we did stumble on all six, eh!
The French do like a flutter, though, but independent high-street book-making à l’anglaise is illegal, so they gamble 26 billion euros a year (that’s 72 million a day) on the State-run Loto, scratchcards, tote and sports scores.
NOR do the official organisers, la Française des Jeux, seem to have suffered too much from the arrival of international on-line betting in 2010, which is more than can be said for the nation’s 200 casinos and their 22,000 fruit machines.
A dusty old law dating way back to 1836 forbids any other organised gambling, lotteries, bingo and so on except for your parish hall salle des fêtes fundraisers run by charities, clubs and associations.
Mind you, even there trouble can flare when they call in professional assistance to set up and run the event, blurring the red line between amateur and pro.
In 2006 the boss of a wedding, anniversary and birthday party company in southern Brittany paid 40,000 euros for a small firm specialising in one-stop-shop, local Loto nights. They looked after all the advertising, equipment, entertainment, prizes and refreshments, and handed over a stress-free cheque to the grateful deserving cause at the end of the evening.
It all seemed perfectly legal, all done in good faith. Contracts had been exchanged at the notaire’s and all the regulation mountain of paperasse (red tape) sorted out with the Tribunal de Commerce and the Impôts.
Business took off and the company had organised more than 350 bingo nights in the Morbihan by the time Customs and Excise turned up, demanding nearly 500,000 euros Impôts sur les spectacles.
The state prosecutor finally decided not press the charge of organising the evenings in their own name, but still asked the judge to impose a 75,000 euro fine for illegal gambling.
The businessman just couldn’t understand what he was supposed to have done wrong, though. He said: ‘The court talked about little country dos with a pop-up toaster as top prize, but that all disappeared in 2004 when the government removed the 300 euro prize limit. Today you can win cars, plasma tellies and holidays. There are more and more bingo nights, more and more players, more and more companies like mine, and everybody’s happy.’
Anyway, some charity got on to their Député, or MP, who got on to the ministry in Paris, and they replied, rather unhelpfully, that the evenings could still be organised, but only within a restricted circle. What that actually means has been left to the courts to decide, case by case.
What it now meant for the man in the dock was six months’ porridge suspended, and his company was fined 5,000 euros and ordered to pay the taxman 60,000.
Not surprisingly, he and his counsel went ballistic: how on earth can you be convicted for doing something that wasn’t an offence at the time you did it?
THE 71-year-old Lucienne, another Calvados resident, hadn’t laid out a bean when this letter arrived in 2006 announcing some unexpected good fortune. ‘Dear client and dear winner, before congratulating you, we can truly guarantee that you really have won. The bailiff’s letter proves it: you are indeed the person who is going to receive a cheque for 10,000 euros from our company.’
But when Lucienne claimed her prize, they said she’d only won a ticket for the draw. Now where have we heard that before, eh?
Lulu felt hard done by and the Tribunal d’Instance in Lisieux agreed. They ordered the company to pay up, but the Court of Appeal sitting at the Palais de Justice in Caen ruled that the Tribunal had got it wrong. Read the very small print in very pale grey tucked away at the very bottom of the very last page, dear.
Then, in July 2010, the Cour de Cassation in Paris, the highest court in the land, which only decides points of law rather than the facts of the case as such, overturned the Caen verdict: the small print was excessively small, and virtually illegible even if you did manage to spot it. The letter had clearly been designed to mislead the recipient.
So it was back to Caen for a new and final hearing, and dear old Lulu won this time, bless her. Actually, she’s developed quite a taste for all this judicial skirmishing and has just filed two more claims for bogus cash prizes. Well, she’s on legal aid anyway, so it’s not costing her anything, and the money will come in handy for the grandchildren’s Christmas presents, won’t it?
THEN again, she could bid for a bargain at the post office auction. La Poste handles 270 million parcels a year, but 250,000 never get delivered, because the address is incomplete or doesn’t even exist, or the addressee has disappeared into the ether and the sender is also unknown.
If the packet isn’t claimed within six months, it’s sold to the highest bidder, earning the state one million euros clear and enabling them to give us a free postal search service. Which is about all they are going to give us in these troubled Triple A times, though, Christmas or no Christmas, even if people on welfare will still get a 150 euro Yuletide bonus, or 320 for a family with two kids.
ANYWAY, here’s wishing you all a very Joyeux Noël! I only wish we Mastermen could be there on The Rock with you to chink a glass of chilled and beaded bubbles. Mind you, there’s worse places to be than Dinan, eh, the town our student daughters, Morgane and Fleur, call home!
Kenavo!
