Lottery winner comes home to claim €100m jackpot

A LUCKY Belgium resident has returned home from holiday to find themselves €100 million richer after discovering a winning lottery ticket.

The winner of the Euromillions prize, sought since February 9, has been identified as an inhabitant of Belgium’s Flemish north but has decided to remain anonymous, the Belgian national lottery said.

The clock had been ticking on the lucky winner, as their fortune would be returned to the national lottery pot if left unclaimed for 20 weeks, leading to feverish speculation in the Belgian press and much scrabbling behind sofa cushions amongst everyone else.

“As we thought, this person had gone away on holiday for a few days and has only just presented themselves,” said national lottery spokeswoman Ann Publie.

Unclaimed Euromillions prizes revert to the national lottery pot of the country where the winning ticket was bought, to be distributed to charities.

The massive jackpot was by no means the biggest in the history of the extremely lucrative Euromillions game, which was launched in February 2004.

The biggest of all was a €115,436,126 win in the summer of 2005 by Limerick woman Dolores McNamara.

However, it was a record for a winner in Belgium.

The Belgian win will however, do little to ease the pain of a group of 30 residents of the town of Mouscron, in the south of the country, who thought they had won €27m between them last December — only to discover that the person in charge of buying the ticket for their regular numbers had decided to change their numbers.