A group of British IT workers who won 45 million pounds in a record lottery payout revealed Tuesday how they feared they were going to be sacked when they received the call about the win. John Walsh, 57, who with six members of his syndicate won 45,570,836 pounds (75,994,135 dollars, 50,668,873 euros) in Friday's Euromillions draw, was the first to discover they had hit the jackpot Sunday, and called his colleagues.
"I didn't quite get the response I expected because, with the economy in the state that it is in, everyone has been worried about jobs, so they all thought I was calling them to tell they had been made redundant," Walsh said.
"But thankfully I got to tell them some good news instead." The seven work at Hewlett Packard in Liverpool, north-west England, but with individual winnings of 6.5 million pounds, they have handed in their notice. Fellow winner Alex Parry, 19, only left school last year. She said a blue car in the colours of Everton FC would be her first priority.
The syndicate was not the only big winner in Britain at the weekend, as a Welsh couple scooped the other half of the 91-million-pound jackpot, Britain's biggest ever payout. Les Scadding, a 58-year-old mechanic who lost his job last Christmas, won with his wife, Samantha Peachey-Scadding, 38, who runs her own marketing firm. "It is a funny thing with my family but for the last 12 years I have always said I'm going to win the lottery," Scadding told reporters. "My family all laughed at me. My daughter, who lives in Abu Dhabi, always asked 'Have you won the lottery?' and I would say, 'Next time'."