Sep
17
MADRID—If you lost a lottery ticket in the Spanish city of Corunna last year, you are in luck: it won a €4.7 million ($6.2 million) prize.
The still-unclaimed slip of paper was found on a counter in July over a year ago, by Manuel Reija, the owner of one of dozens of lottery shops in the northwestern Spanish city. Mr. Reija told local paper La Voz de Galicia that he was amazed when he checked the numbers on the ticket, dated June 2012, and realized it had won an unusually big jackpot.
Mr. Reija then handed the ticket to Spain’s state-owned lottery administration, that took its sweet time to handle the case. It only notified the city authorities weeks ago. On Monday, a brief notice about the lost ticket was placed in the city government website.
This is where things get really interesting: the notice, written in strict legalese and buried in a lost-and-found section of the website (intriguing fact: among the next 10 lost items in the list, there are four Samsung smartphones, and zero iPhones) gives no information on how to claim the ticket.
A city official explains that she can’t really provide that information either, since it will be released at a later date, on a different website. In case you lost the ticket and are willing to play the bureaucratic game, it’s www.dicoruna.es, owned by the government of La Corunna province—roughly, the Spanish equivalent of a county.
Concerned citizens must look for the provincial bulletin of La Corunna in that website, and refresh their browsers until at some point, likely in coming days, the information is provided, the official says.
The city is not saying how many have already tried to claim the ticket, but La Voz de Galicia reports that six people have shown up at the town hall with similar stories about how they lost it.
Mr. Reija is not one of them. When asked by the paper whether he ever thought of keeping the lottery ticket for himself, he responds: “Never. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”
Meanwhile, La Corunna mayor Carlos Negreira took a chance to joke about Spanish austerity policies, as he made a statement about the unusual case.
“I’m going to be the only mayor in Spain that looks for a millionaire not to ask for money, but give this person money,” he said Tuesday.
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