A factory employee who claims to have won Rs. 5.6 million in a lottery has lodged a complaint with the police to say that she has been cheated of the bulk of her winnings by her boss, the factory owner. In her complaint, W. Elizabeth Fernando, 50, an employee of a coir factory in Kalpitiya, told the Chilaw Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) that she was the lucky winner of a lottery that brought her Rs. 5.6 million, but that her employer was holding on to most of the money, and that he had given her only Rs. 1.3 million to date.
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| Mrs Fernando’s house |
According to Mrs. Fernando, she bought three lottery tickets on May 15 at the Villaththawa village fair. When her daughter checked the tickets after the lottery results were announced, she found that one ticket was worth Rs. 5.6 million. Mrs. Fernando then informed her employer about her good fortune.
“My boss asked me for the winning ticket, saying he was on his way to Colombo to check on his tax file, and that he would collect the money and hand it over to me on his return,” Mrs. Fernando said, adding that her employer had promised that her money would be safe with him. He had even declined Mrs. Fernando’s offer to help cover the fuel costs of the trip to Colombo and back.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Fernando’s daughter claimed she had seen her mother’s boss on TV receiving the prize money from the Lotteries Board.
“The following day we telephoned him and asked for the money, only to be told that he was still in Colombo. On the 10th, , when we contacted him again by phone, he said the prize money was only Rs. 1.3 million, and asked us to come to Chilaw to pick up the money,” she said.
Mrs. Fernando made a complaint to the Chilaw police and informed the Lotteries Board about what had happened. On June 13, a brother of the proprietor deposited Rs. 1.2 million into Mrs. Fernando’s account and gave her another Rs. 123,000 in cash.
According to an official at the Chilaw ASP’s office, the case has been taken up by the Fraud Bureau in Colombo.
Mrs. Fernando and her husband, who have four married children, live in a house on the factory premises. They have no house of their own. | 
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