Winners get their full $50M
Bell call centre workers fighting for share of lotto jackpot lose claim
The battle for the $50 million is over, leaving broken friendships and a poisoned workplace in its wake.
The office pool of 19 (now mostly former) Bell Canada call centre workers have their full shares of the Lotto Max jackpot they won two years ago.
A binding arbitration ruling dismissed the claim to portions of the winnings by nine other co-workers and ordered the release of the remaining $18.4 million held by the courts.
For Natalie Damianidis, the pool’s organizer, having the final cheque in her hands lifts a huge weight off her shoulders. “Finally, after two long years, I feel vindicated,” said the former dispatcher at the Scarborough Bell Canada call centre.
She quit her job of 15 years, about a year after the winning draw on Dec. 31, 2010, succumbing to the pressure of working with people who believed she cheated them out of a fortune.
“It’s not about the money,” she said on Monday. “It was very hurtful towards me . . . some of those people I considered friends.”
But she said she was always sure she did nothing wrong: “It was black and white, there was no grey.”
Damianidis discovered their historic win — the first single ticket to nab the $50 million prize — on the night of Jan. 3, 2011. Their office pool was just four weeks old, operating on a monthly fee of $20. The last $5 bought the winning ticket.
Cheers echoed through the office building at Brimley and Ellesmere Rds. that Monday as 17 women and two men (now known as the Bell19) learned of their millionaire status.
But the next day some of the joy soured. Other call centre employees had come forward claiming a stake in the win, effectively freezing the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. payout until the dispute could be resolved.
Their claim: several of the Bell 19 had been part of an informal weekly office pool of about 40 people since February or March 2010.
By breaking away to form a more structured group, they acted in “bad faith,” stated Marek Tufman, the lawyer hired by the nine claimants, in a statement of claim filed in February 2011.
His clients were in a partnership “for the purpose of joint participation in lottery draws.”
Tufman declined to comment on the arbitrator’s decision Monday.
On Valentine’s Day last year, OLG granted a partial payout to the group of 19 at almost $1.7 million each, handing the rest to the courts until the dispute could be resolved.
Saul Glober, the lawyer representing the Bell 19, said the arbitrator’s ruling to dismiss the case boils down to: “If you pay you’re in.”
“If we bought a ticket together last March and I win (with another ticket) in December, you can’t say because we were together in March, I’m a lifetime partner.”
Like Damianidis, Christine Hell- strom is relieved their two years of waiting, testifying and crossing their fingers is at an end. Six months after the win, she quit her job as a call centre manager and used her winnings to pursue a dream. Last November, she opened a high-end lingerie store in Richmond Hill. Its name, Coup de Foudre, means “love at first sight” or “struck by lightning.” It’s a reference to the suddenness of her good fortune, though Hellstrom and three other members of the Bell 19 had gotten lucky before, winning a $1 million prize from Encore in 2007 as part of another employee pool. Damianidis still drives her ’97 Civic, the car whose empty tank brought her to the gas station where she bought the winning ticket. She still buys lottery tickets too, though not with the pool members.