The winner wants it all

Just imagine for a moment that you're in a casino playing on one of those slot machines.

Next to you is a friend, also happily gambling away, and although you've been pumping money into that little devil for quite a while now, you've not actually won anything of any consequence.

So you turn round and ask your friend to hit the lever to set the thing in motion and then press the appropriate button to stop its rotation.

All the time of course it's your money that has been playing and it's in effect "your" machine.

Your friend obliges and.....KERCHING - you hit the jackpot to the tune of €2.175 million!

That's exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago to Marie-Hélène when she won at a casino in Palavas-les-Flots not far from the city of Montpellier in the south of France.

And her friend, Francis was with her the next day when the bubbly was flowing and the casino handed over a cheque for the full amount.

The local press was even there to record the event, with the smiling winner proclaiming, "He's my lucky charm, my four-leafed clover."

End of story perhaps. Except of course it isn't.

It has now been picked up by the national media because Francis would like something more than simply to be remembered as Marie-Hélène's "porte-bonheur".

He also wants a slice of the winnings - half of it reportedly - and of course he has found himself a lawyer.

"My client was playing on the machine next to the one which hit the jackpot," Luc Abratkiewicz told the national daily, Le Parisien.

"She asked him to 'play' for her and he set the machine in motion and pressed the button," he added.

"To win, a player needed to perform three separate actions* and my client carried out two of those."

As far as the casino is concerned there's only one winner.

"It's clear Marie-Hélène is the winner," said Jean-Marc Masquelier, the director of the casino.

"On the day that the jackpot was won, nobody said anything other than that - including her friend who even participated at the celebrations to hand over the cheque."

So far Marie-Hélène has refused to comment, and she certainly hasn't handed over any of the prize money.

Instead the case has been turned over to investigators from the brigade des jeux who are looking at video footage of what actually happened before, during and after the slot machine went KERCHING.

And the moral of this tale?




*the other one of course being to have provided to the money in the first place.