A Rotorua man who bought a Lotto ticket at Springfield Suprette is now $24 million richer.
The prize is reportedly made up of $23.8m from Powerball First Division and $500,000 from Lotto First Division. This is the seventh Powerball jackpot ticket sold this year, and this win one of the biggest in Lotto history.
No one has come forward to claim the prize yet. “We haven’t heard anything, but the town is abuzz,” said spokeswoman Katy Atkin.
Raj Kumar, owner of Springfield Suprette, said that he went to the store Sunday to see if the winner will go to the store to claim the prize. He said that it didn’t matter whether the lucky person was rich or poor: “Whoever buys the ticket is the person who deserves to win, their social status in life doesn’t matter.”
He said that though the store had some lucky tickets in the past few years, this was the store’s first jackpot.
“This is a big buzz. We’ve sold tickets for big amounts before – we’ve sold $1m before – but to have sold $24m is amazing,” he told reporters.
“I always dreamed about selling something this big. That’ll be a blast for whoever wins it.
Rotorua mayor Steve Chadwick hopes that the winner is “someone really deserving.”
“Everybody’s wondering, it’s not a small town. Everybody will know someone who’s connected to those winners,” he added.
TVNZ reported that the Lotteries Commission is expecting to sell $1 billion worth of tickets (53 per cent going to prizes) this financial year.
This is the seventh time in 2015 that a player won the top Powerball prize. In March, a man from Auckland won $9.1 million.
