The life of Santiago Martin (popularly known as ‘Lottery King’) resembles that of gangsters shown in popular Hollywood trilogy, The Godfather. The 55 years old businessman has built a Rs 7,000 crore empire through illegal but socially acceptable business. The ‘rags to riches’ story of Martin starts from Myanmar, where he worked as a daily wage laborer. Later he moved to India to try his luck in lottery business and opened Martin Lottery Agencies Ltd in 1988. He has got friends across the political power circles in the state of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The only party which he could not influence was Jayalalithaa led AIADMK.
He has produced two movies based on stories written by DMK chief M Karunanidhi. The 20 crore rupees Tamil film called Ilaignan was written by Karunanidhi found no producers until Martin picked it up. Senior Congress leader and Supreme Court lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvi fought the case for him. He gave Rs 2 crore to CPM mouthpiece Deshabhimani in 2007 when CPM led Left Democratic Front was ruling the state with V. S. Achuthanandan as chief minister. He faces 32 cases of lottery fraud in Kerala alone but the government made no efforts to put him behind the bars, a favor for his generous donations to party. His lottery business extended to the states of Karnataka, Sikkim, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Punjab and Maharashtra. He is also accused of defrauding Rs 4,500 crore to the Sikkim government by selling its lottery in Kerala.
Recently, officials of Income Tax department raided 70 premises owned by Martin. The officials seized Rs 40 lakh cash through coordinated raids on 70 locations – 22 in Coimbatore, 10 in Chennai, 18 in Kolkata, five in Mumbai, three in Delhi, and two each in Hyderabad, Guwahati, Siliguri, Gangtok, Ranchi and Ludhiana. The Coimbatore based businessman primarily operates in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Northeastern states.
Jayalalithaa, the late chief minister of Tamil Nadu banned the lottery in Tamil Nadu in 2003. Martin established his empire by running the lotteries of the state governments and managing its operations. After the blowback in Tamil Nadu, Martin expanded his business empire in the lottery schemes in Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, and Manipur besides Punjab and Maharashtra. Lottery schemes are legal in these states and used to be major source of revenue for the local governments in previous decade.
Martin did not limit his network to India. He expanded the lottery business in Nepal and Bhutan and soon forged a very good relationship with Bhutanese and Nepalese governments. The relationship with officers on higher echelons of government of Nepal and Bhutan helped him to monopolize the lottery business in these countries and he became sole distributor of lottery tickets.
First time he came under the ambit of law in 2011 when the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered 32 cases against him for defrauding Sikkim government of Rs 4,500 crore. As per CBI claims, he sold Rs 4,752 crore Sikkim government tickets in Kerala but paid back only Rs 143 crore. CBI conducted a detailed probe, and in 2014, concluded that the case is related to money laundering. The winners accepted to CBI that they used Sikkim government lottery tickets to convert black money into white.
The case of Martin is a typical rag to riches story like a movie based on the life of a gangster, like Nawazuddin Siddiqui in Sacred Games. His biopic could be seen in Hindi Cinema very soon given the fondness for dark characters in the industry.
Good one