The 90 million was won by a pool of 23 cab drivers from Ghana, 48 million and change is at stake and 14 other Atlanta Airport cabbies are upset because they did not get “asked” (quotes mine) to contribute for the final draw which ended in the win. A judge has now ordered an injunction and the winnings will be held until such time as a decision is made. It’s 2.3 mil if it goes to the 23 and 1.3 if the others are included. A very good argument for never entering a lottery pool, but I am wondering what y’all think? Should 14 people get a slice of the pie just because they would have contributed if they had been asked?
That’s the gist of it. Sorry I can’t give you a URL for the story on the net, but I got it off the evening news.
BTW, no one knows why the 14 were suddenly shut out of the pool, if that matters, and the Ghanians (?) want to take their winnings to help their country, where they say the average pay is 15 bucks a week.
Put it this way: If 12 secretaries in an office started an investors’ club in 198? and bought 1000 shares of MicroSoft stock cheap at the ground floor, would the other six secretaries have any standing to claim today that they deserve their millions of dollars because they would have invested if they’d been asked?
I just don’t see where the implied principle of “if you were within a mile of this thing happening and happened to do the same job, you deserve to share in the winnings” comes from…so the extra cabbies weren’t asked. So what? Nothing stopped those 14 people from going and buying their own ticket.
… and what I think will have to happen is that the lottery commission will have to turn those winnings over to one individual, the one with the winning numbers. What a hell of a nightmare precedent this would be if it were ruled otherwise!
It’s little consolation, but those 14 cabbies will at least have a story to tell in their old age of how they almost became millionaires.
I wish I could remember who posted this in the pit, but I have to smile because it just really fits the situation. I won’t quote it verbatim, but it starts with (I think) , “Don’t come whining to me because life has parked its beefy bus up your ass…”
The rest of the quote can be found on Opal’s (Hi Opal!) site.
Well what are the details? Did they just do one big collection and go buy the tickets? Did they slowly build the pool over time, and those that were left out of the winnings had merely failed to make the last contribution? Please specify.
I have been in lottery pools at work, and it’s got me hooked on the damn lottery.
Our pool only lasted a few weeks before most people became tired of it. Some people knew of the pool but were not asked to participate, a couple were flat out excluded.
IMHO, the ‘I would have, if I’d been asked…’ argument is lame. Who says you have to be asked? Being involved in a pool is not a right. And a pool only lasts until the drawing, and then a new pool must start. If you want in, you’d better not wait to be asked to contribute.
These guys are a bunch of whiny butts trying to leach in. If the pool hadn’t hit a number, would they have coughed up the money they should have contributed, or would they keep their wallets in their pockets.
These 14 should start their own pool and leave the winners alone.
they could have bought tickets on their own if they’d wanted…
however, i bought tickets for that drawing, i’m sorry i forgot to ask them, but i’m willing to make amends. please ask them to send me one dollar each.
also, let them know we didn’t win any money this time.
And today’s article I read in The (Toledo) Blade notes that the lawsuit filed by the 14 left out cabbies asserts that they were part of a group that regularly pooled its resources for tickets, and that winnings and left-over money was used to buy tickets for the next week. Thus, what you may have is a contract among the participants that all are members of a group that has agreed to pool winnings from any prize they win regardless of who actually contributed money for any single game.
The grant of the restraining order by the judge shows that the judge, at least, thought the allegations in the suit had a substantial chance of resulting in a victory for the plaintiffs, else the order wouldn’t have issued. It will now be incumbent upon the defendants to establish that there was no such agreement. My prediction is that the 14 plaintiffs will succede if they can demonstrate that there were times that not all of the 23 ‘winners’ participated in previous weeks, yet received the benefit of pooled winnings anyway.
So, you see, it isn’t a situation of someone claiming they ‘would have’ contributed if asked. Nasty thing, facts…
Not so sure about that, DS. I think (and it’s been a looooong time since I’ve been involved in litigation in GA) that Georgia has joined some other state and federal jurisdictions in “evolving” the “substantial liklihood of success” standard into a “ripe for litigation” standard if the harm to the plantiffs in absence of the TRO is substantial and the harm to the defendants if the TRO is put in place is minimal.
Here, of course, the harm to the plaintiffs would be the millions dissipating to relatives in all kinds of unrecoverable jurisdictions, whereas the harm to the defendants is merely not getting millions as a prize for the duration of the case.
So I think the burden of proof will still lie with the 14.
Okay. So a verbal “contract” existed at some point, is that what you’re saying? That puts a different spin on it,I suppose (I’m not a lawyer) and if just one of the Ghanians admitted that yes, the other 14 were a part of this pool before the winning numbers came through, then the 14 would be entitled to share in the winnings, even though they did not contribute (for whatever reason) the week that those numbers came up. Have I got that right?
If everything was done according to the way lottery pools ususally operate then everyone who participated in a given week would have received a copy of all tickets bought.This
would at least provide some clue that a “partnership” did exist at some point and would help their case, right? But it puzzles me that a verbal contract under these circumstances can be binding.
Anyway, thanks for the reference and mea culpa for not providing enough facts in the beginning.
Not necessarily. The grant of a TRO doesn’t shift the burden of proof. The formula for TROs is cumulative multifactor, not all-or-nothing. A small probability of success on the merits coupled with a high probability of irrevocable harm to the plaintiffs in the event the order does not issue is sufficient to sustain a TRO. In this case, we have a strong probability of irreparable harm to the plaintiffs, virtually no probability of irreparable harm to the defendants, and at least a credible argument in support of the plaintiff’s contentions. Issuing the TRO is equitable under the circumstances.
I assume that tickets bought by pools are considered to have been purchased by (possibly informal) general partnerships rather than by the pool’s representative; otherwise, the pool’s representative would have to pay all of the taxes on the winnings. (A general partnership would pass the taxes through to the membership by distributive shares.) Does anyone know how this actually gets handled when the record purchaser of a lottery ticket has a fiduciary duty to others with respect to that ticket? Does the lottery commission handle the distribution, or is it up to the pool’s agent?
I don’t know what the law on this is, but in the real world, the cabbies who were shut out had contributed to the winning lottery collection. If you want to argue that they should only receive a smaller percentage of the winnings than those who directly contributed to the final drawing, well that’s up for debate. However, since the rollover that included money won from groups of tickets they had, in effect, purchased was part of the fund used to buy the winning ticket, they most certainly have a claim on the money.
This goes beyond a simple contract dispute. What is being alleged is that the pool was a joint “investment” venture to which everyone had contributed. The allegation made by the plaintiffs is not breach of contract, but rather breach of fiduciary duty.
It is suprisingly easy to create a general partnership under the common law. Basically, a general partnership arises time two or more people pool resources into a common economic venture, unless they do something to explicitly avoid the formation of a partnership. General partnerships can easily arise as the result of a verbal agreement.
