The trial against two members of the family that has controlled the lottery business in A Coruña for 80 years is reaching its final stage. After the parade of witnesses and the defendants’ statements, the prosecutor maintains her request for six-year prison sentences for each of the two Reija brothers for allegedly devising a plan to keep a client’s Primitiva ticket and collect the 4.7 million prize. The public prosecutor believes that Manuel, the lottery vendor, in 2012 concealed from a client the fortune he had won in an “act of greed” and with “the most malevolent coldness”. And that Miguel, still today the delegate of State Lotteries in A Coruña, a position held by his grandfather and father, “disguised the illicit origin” of the ticket “as a find” and hindered the search for its true owner so that the money would go into his brother Manuel’s pocket.
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The Prosecutor’s Office charges Manuel Reija with fraud or misappropriation. Regarding Miguel, it withdraws the accusation of concealment because it considers it time-barred and maintains that of money laundering. It considers that the delegate of Lotteries in A Coruña used his position and his relationships with the directors of the State Lotteries and Betting Society (Selae), an organization dependent on the Ministry of Finance, to “mask the illegality” committed by his lottery vendor brother and “pave the way” for the 4.7 million. Both, having been linked to the business for decades, knew “perfectly the laxity of Selae’s control,” its operation and its timings, the accusations maintain.
Miguel Reija has declared that he acted with his lottery vendor brother “exactly the same” as with any other lottery administrator. He “fully accepted” his version that he had casually found the 4.7 million ticket on the counter when he was alone at his point of sale. He saw no “illicit attitude” in him because he “was acting in a totally honorable manner”. “He didn’t need me at all to collect,” he defends. “He could have collected it in an opaque way”.
The accusations emphasize that the delegate of Lotteries in A Coruña, who has held the position since 1989, allowed the destruction of valuable clues to find the true owner of the winning ticket. He has admitted that, although his lottery vendor brother informed him that he had found the 4.7 million ticket mixed with other stubs, he never asked him to also keep those other bets, as they had been made by the true owner and would have helped locate him. He says he didn’t see it as “important” at that moment. “It didn’t seem relevant to me having the main ticket,” he argues. Those bets, which the police recovered years later thanks to computer records, were crucial to finding the prize owner and supporting the fraud accusation against his brother.
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Miguel Reija admits that he knew the place, day, and time the multimillion-dollar bet had been sealed, but it didn’t occur to him to check if there were cameras that might have recorded the prize owner. He claims there was no established protocol and that he made decisions on the fly. He took the steps, he states, not to help his brother in the alleged plan to get the money, but “for the benefit of the possible owner” and thinking of preventing the public company from opening “a long file” that would delay the collection of the prize. The delegate of Lotteries, who has not stopped defending his brother’s honesty, has stated that he always acted “under direct orders from Selae” and that he didn’t even know that Manuel Reija had submitted up to four requests to the public company for the money to be deposited to him.
The delegate of Lotteries has admitted that his brother did not act correctly when he checked if the ticket he claims to have found on display had a prize. For the Prosecutor’s Office and the accusations, this behavior by the lottery vendor is not credible, because the stubs that vendors usually find discarded go into the wastebasket, as they are left by customers because they have no prize. The Prosecutor’s Office and the private accusations consider the lottery vendor’s version of the casual find “irrational” and believe that the delegate of Lotteries used “his privileged position” to help him introduce the stolen ticket “into the legitimate market” with the minimum possible inquiries.