The Enforcement Directorate has filed a charge sheet before a special PMLA court in Kolkata against Martin Santiago‘s company Future Gaming and Hotel Services Pvt Ltd and 15 other companies, popularly known as betting and lottery kings. After this big action of ED, lottery king Martin Santiago is once again in the headlines.
Lottery King Martin Santiago has as much grip as he has in the lottery or betting business. He has the same grip in political parties. He gives a lot of money to political parties and in return, takes many types of facilities from them. His grip is from the police to the court. Which has come up many times. This is the year 2021. The Prudent Electoral Trust, through which business houses donate to political parties, revealed that a total of Rs 245.7 crore of political donations were made by it. Among the donors, the name of a company was such that everyone was surprised. That name was Future Gaming & Hotel Services Pvt. Ltd. The company is said to be owned by Martin Santiago Martin, popularly known as Satta King, who gave Rs 100 crore to the Prudent Trust in the name of donations to political parties. The parties that got it were not even small political parties. Given.
Who is Martin Santiago?
Martin Santiago, also known as the Lottery King, is the only betting king who has access to the corridors of power. Martin Santiago, who calls himself a big businessman, actually built his empire by selling lottery tickets.
Worked as a labourer at the beginning of my life.
Martin, who worked as a labourer in Myanmar early in his life, started his lottery business in Tamil Nadu in 1988 under the name Martin Lottery Agencies Ltd. Gradually expanded to Kerala and Karnataka. However, he had to leave Tamil Nadu in 2003 when the government banned lotteries. After that, he started running lotteries in the North East. Its value is said to be more than 7 thousand crores. He spread his business to Nepal and Bhutan.
Jayalalithaa took action
There was a time when Martin was pouring money on him. Martin also made friends with many powerful leaders in the South on the strength of his immense wealth, but AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa stopped his money juggernaut. In fact, the late Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa banned lotteries in Tamil Nadu in 2003. Martin became helpless and then he rebuilt his empire by running lotteries of many state governments. I did it. After suffering a setback in Tamil Nadu, Martin expanded his lottery empire to Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Manipur, besides Punjab, Maharashtra.
There is deep penetration in Nepal and Bhutan
Martin did not limit his network to India. He expanded the lottery business in Nepal and Bhutan and soon developed very good relations with the Bhutanese and Nepalese governments. Relations with high-level officials of the Government of Nepal and Bhutan helped Martin to monopolize the lottery business in these countries and he was the sole owner of lottery tickets. Became a distributor. Martin’s bad days began again in 2011 when Jayalalithaa came back to power in Tamil Nadu. In 2011, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered 32 cases against him for cheating. On the other hand, Jayalalithaa got Martin arrested in 2012. He also had to go to jail. King Martin is not a small man. This can be gauged from the fact that after being arrested in 2012, he soon got bail and there was one of the top lawyers in the country who argued in the court on his behalf. Santiago also made two films based on the stories of DMK chief M. Karunanidhi. The Rs 20 crore Tamil film Elaignan was written by Karunanidhi. No producer was found until Martin picked it up. Almost all major parties of Martin Relationships are reported. When Martin went to jail, his wife Lima Rose took over the lottery business.
Martin’s companies cheated the Sikkim government of crores of rupees by manipulating the price of the lottery and the number of winners. Martin sold tickets worth Rs 4,752 crore of the Sikkim government in Kerala but paid only Rs 143 crore.Lottery tickets were used. After his arrest in 2012, it has not been easy for lottery king Martin to run his business hidden behind the scenes. Many state governments, CBI, ED, Income Tax Department are now constantly monitoring him. In the last decade and a half, Martin has faced many cases and also raided many of his locations across the country, in which undisclosed money worth billions of rupees was recovered. Many properties were attached to his country in 2019.
In one such raid on R’s premises, an amount of about Rs 595 crore was recovered. In 2021, the ED began a money laundering probe against Martin based on the CBI chargesheet. Under this, many immovable properties of Martin in Tamil Nadu were attached. The value of which is said to be around Rs 278 crore. This process of ED action continues in 2022 as well. In April 2022, the ED provisionally attached Martin’s assets worth around Rs 409 crore. Then in July, the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which is probing the money laundering aspect in the lottery scam in Kochi, attached assets worth Rs 173 crore of prime accused Santiago Martin and his associates.
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