NATIONAL LOTTERY

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The amount of National Lottery money handed to organisations for asylum seekers trebled last year. The money paid for a string of projects including encouraging them to play football and producing an opera. In all, more than £6.7million went to asylum causes in a year in which the number arriving in the country to claim refuge fell to its lowest in more than a decade. The leap in the scale of money sent to such organisations by the various lottery good cause boards came in a year when the concern over the use of the money was focused on the billions diverted by the Government to the 2012 Olympics.

Lottery spending peaked at more than £10million in 2004 and then fell to £2,156,248 in 2006, but figures supplied by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport show that it went back up to £6,723,958 last year. Among the grants was one by the Awards for All board to the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre to help young asylum seekers "write and produce and opera and an animated film". The same board provided £5,000 for Iranian asylum seekers to "share their experiences through art", £9,400 to a Birmingham group to "celebrate friendships between asylum seekers and people born in the UK" and £4,690 to provide advice to Congolese asylum seekers in Stoke.

The grants were made at a time when ministers at the Communities Department were publishing guidelines that said state money should not be paid to individual national and cultural groups to avoid encouraging separatism. The biggest asylum grant was £1million paid by the New Opportunities Fund to the Scottish Refugee Council "to challenge and change misconceptions about asylum seekers". Various refugee bodies were paid to help different groups play football or volleyball.

The biggest of these went to Strathclyde Police, given nearly £458,000 by the Big Lottery Fund to "integrate asylum seekers into local communities through sport". The Big Lottery Fund replaced the discredited Community Fund, closed down after it was revealed five years ago it had given £340,000 to a group devoted to helping failed asylum seekers fight deportation. (Source: Mail on Sunday, Jan/08)

Artist Kira O’Reilly has received Lottery money to strip naked and hug a dead pig. Visitors to the Newlyn Art Gallery near Penzance, Cornwall, can watch O’Reilly only one at a time for ten minutes. She will perform in a small bedroom-like set with props including sheets, flowers and a plastic swan. The piece, entitled Inthewrongplaceness, is billed as a “slow crushing dance with a pig”. It is part of an international programme running, with the help of £30,000 from Arts Council England, in a disused social club while a new art centre is built. (Source: The Sun, Aug/06)

A foreign company run from the Far East won a £16m national lottery jackpot by buying thousands of tickets. The company, based in the Philippines, used a British man to purchase up to 14,000 tickets in a rollover week on behalf of overseas gamblers. It ended up winning £16,628,000, transferring one of the biggest jackpots in the lottery’s 10-year history offshore to a secret Liechtenstein bank account. It is the first time that overseas gamblers are known to have won the top prize. The disclosure is likely to embarrass Camelot, the lottery operator, which is supposed to run it for the benefit of British residents. The rules restrict entry to British citizens and foreign tourists visiting the country. People living abroad can play, but only if they have a British address and bank account.

Police suspected an Asian syndicate may have been behind the operation but did not pursue their inquiries after Camelot told them there had been no breach of the rules. By using a UK-based agent, the company was able to buy as many tickets as it liked. The company, Overseas Subscribers Agents (OSA), is operated by a British businessman and his Indian and New Zealand partners from an office in Manila. It claims to have helped 100,000 overseas players to gamble on domestic lotteries. Camelot admits it is concerned at the “commercial exploitation” of the British lottery by such companies, which charge users a fee of up to £4 a ticket for their services, but added it was not illegal. OSA’s British-based agent is Ken Jackson, a former plastics technologist from Sheringham, Norfolk.

He admitted he had been buying up to 14,000 tickets a week for the company since 1995, spending two hours processing them at his local Woolworths or his newsagent. It is estimated that he has spent £3.5m on tickets in that time, winning small prizes every week and in November 2001, £127,000. Then came the jackpot in January 2002. “We shredded all the tickets. I didn’t want all that incriminating paperwork around,” he said. It is not clear whether the tickets were bought on behalf of a single syndicate attempting to increase its chances of winning or individual overseas players. Nor is it known whether the company used other UK-based agents at the same time to shorten the odds further. There are almost 14m different number combinations in the draw.

By buying 14,000 tickets with different numbers, the chances of winning the jackpot are reduced from about 1 in 14m to 1 in 1,000. The company would, on average, expect to recoup 245 £10 prizes a week and between 13 and 14 £65 prizes a week. Therefore, on average, it could expect to make back up to £3,360 from the £14,000 every week. The jackpot attracted significant press interest because Jackson waited eight days before claiming the prize. He earned £48,000 interest while the prize money was held in a British bank before being transferred to Liechtenstein.

Detectives came across the money transfer as part of an investigation into a series of suspicious transactions overseas involving a solicitor linked to a number of unrelated frauds. The solicitor, who transferred the jackpot out of Britain, was later struck off for the frauds. John Whittingdale, the shadow culture secretary, criticised the OSA scheme. “This scale of buying by overseas syndicates that have no connection with this country goes against a sense of British fair play,” he said. (Source: Times Online)

Lottery chiefs were under fire for ignoring struggling Brits while giving millions to obscure foreign causes, including £310,000 to help African pygmies make pottery. Your hard-earned cash will go to Rwanda's Twa tribe to "develop their traditional skills" with clay. Another £467,000 is being paid to teach beekeeping in Kenya, almost £10,000 has gone to a treegrowing project in the Philippines and just under £500,000 has been earmarked for yak-herders in Tibet, to boost their public relations profile.

The grants come from the £70million dished out overseas by the Big Lottery Fund since its international programme was launched in December 2006 but watchdogs and MPs accused lotto chiefs of snubbing the needs of UK good causes. Fund papers show the pygmy project is run by Gloucestershire-based charity Forest Peoples Programme to boost the tribe's "self-confidence and social standing".

The £467,000 given to Kenyan villagers to keep bees, run by Gateshead-based charity Traidcraft Exchange, is designed to encourage exports in the east African state. Tibetan herders were given nearly £500,000 at the start of 2008, much of it for improving their image and for lobbying. Cambridge-based Fauna and Flora International say the cash will let herders "demonstrate their abilities to government", basically PR.

The Zoological Society of London hope to "rehabilitate" shrinking mangrove forests in south-east Asia. And about £500,000 has been given to Sport UK to use football to raise HIV/AIDS awareness among youngsters in South Africa, where the killer virus is rampant. The Big Lottery Fund replaced the Community Fund, which was discredited after a string of controversial awards, including £420,000 to help Peruvians breed fatter guinea pigs to eat. (Source: The People, Jun/09)