Annual turnover of ‘lottery king’ Martin’s business at Rs 15,000 crore: ED probe | India News

NEW DELHI: Coimbatore-based Santiago Martin, better known as ‘lottery king‘, has an annual turnover of Rs 15,000 crore from his lottery business, according to an ongoing ED probe that began in 2014. The enforcement agency has already attached properties and other assets worth over Rs 1,000 crore of Martin – Rs 622 crore by its Kochi zonal unit and Rs 409 crore by the Kolkata unit after identification of alleged ‘proceeds of crime’ generated from his illegal gains from the lottery business.
The ED’s probe is based on four FIRs lodged against him and his company: one by CBI in 2014, two by Kolkata Police in 2022 and a fourth registered by the Meghalaya government in 2024 in which it claimed a loss of Rs 1,500 crore from alleged illegal sales by Martin’s entity.
The agency’s recent searches on Martin’s premises, when it seized unaccounted cash of Rs 12 crore and fixed deposits of Rs 6.4 crore, found assets linked to him in Coimbatore, Chennai, Mumbai, Dubai and London, besides investments in share markets.
Martin’s Future Gaming & Hotel Services Pvt Ltd, the company behind the lottery business, was the single largest contributor to political parties with Rs 1,368 crore donated through electoral bonds between 2019 and 2024. Of the Rs 1,592 crore received by TMC through bonds, Rs 542 crore came from Future Gaming.
The lottery king contributed Rs 503 crore to DMK, out of the party’s total bond income of Rs 632 crore. BJP (Rs 100 crore), YSRCP (Rs 154 crore) and Congress (Rs 50 crore) were among other beneficiaries of his benevolence.
The probe further found that Martin had launched more than 350 companies and SPVs (special purpose vehicles) to acquire properties from ‘proceeds of crime’, many of them purchased by giving prize-winning lotteries to sellers of the property.
His relatives and friends were appointed lottery distributors who kept the prize-winning lotteries and later, after the draw, claimed prizes which ranged “from a few lakhs to crores” of rupees. These lotteries were neither sold to the public nor returned to the state government s, as mandated by law. The agency found evidence of unsold bundles of tickets, including prize-winning ones.
ED’s latest findings showed that Martin had sold at least two Assets from the attached assets. The agency is contemplating filing a case against the “criminal act”.
“Though the annual turnover from sale of lotteries of Future Gaming is more than Rs 15,000 crore, the company has declared a very small profit,” a source said. The company majorly deals in Sikkim state lottery and has most of its sales coming from West Bengal (more than 90% business), apart from Kerala (till 2010), Punjab, Goa and Maharashtra. Out of the total cash generated from Sikkim lotteries, Martin paid only Rs 8-10 crore annually to the state government till 2014 as its revenue share, sources said.
The director of Meghalaya State Lottery, Mary Sonty Marak, filed an FIR in Shillong last year alleging that Martin and his close associate Subbayan Nagarajan “conspired with others in intimidating, threatening and coercing the stockists & sub-stockists of Meghalaya State Lottery and prevented the official distribution of state lotteries which caused a business loss to the state of Rs 1,500 crore”.