14 People Hit BGLL’s Million Dollar Anniversary Jackpot

While fourteen people won big this weekend from the Belize Government Lottery Limited’s million-dollar jackpot, the company suffered a loss. The draw, held on Saturday morning, generated a lot of excitement as fourteen people had tickets with the winning numbers: 3-4-4-6. Each person became $71,428.57 richer, with seven of them so far showing up to collect their prize. However, despite selling just over two hundred thousand tickets at five dollars each, the company was unable to turn a profit from the game. This morning, Janel Espat, BGLL’s Managing Director, spoke to our newsroom about the game’s sales and how the company fell short of recouping its investment. She explained that although the anniversary raffle was a success in engagement, the company did not achieve the financial return it had anticipated. 

Janel Espat, Managing Director, Belize Government Lotteries Limited: “We sold a total of $924,140 worth of the One and A Million Anniversary Jackpot tickets. So we did fall a little short of the one million dollar mark. Our payout is of course a million dollars but we were short of $76,000 to break even. That is unfortunate for us because we were prepared to make a charitable contribution of the profit of the anniversary jackpot game so we’ll be unable to make any contribution of that sort. Nevertheless our intention was to allow the people of Belize an opportunity to win a large sum of money and we were able to do that. There are fourteen winners all together so the total payout for each person was $71,428.57 so that’s a significant amount of money and we’re very happy that we were able to have this event and make this a reality for people. Well it’s just gonna come from the Belize Government Lotteries Limited purse. It’s not a significant amount of money. We’re accustomed to the payout being around 70% of the payout so in this case it was a little less than 8% I believe so it’s really not a significant amount of money. Every game overall like I said there’s a 70% average payout so for this game the payout was only about 8%.”

Espat added that the company received reports that some vendors were reusing to sell tickets for the game, which may have attributed to the number of sales.