Fortune Cookie: Bonding with the Lottery King
How lottery king Santiago Martin became the top donor to political parties
V Shoba
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22 Mar, 2024
Santiago Martin (Photo: Reuters)
THE MARTIN FOUNDATION WEBSITE describes him rather blithely as the godfather of lottery. Santiago Martin, 62, whose empire spans over half-a-dozen states and at least three countries, is not only the absolute controlling factor in the world of Indian state lottery but he also has a controlling stake in Indian politics, as data on electoral bonds made public by the Election Commission (EC) following a Supreme Court directive shows. Future Gaming and Hotel Services Pvt Ltd, owned by Martin, has emerged as the top donor to political parties in the past five years, according to EC data. Out of its total purchase of electoral bonds worth ₹1,368 crore, 37 per cent went to Tamil Nadu’s ruling party, the MK Stalin-led Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), which is one of the few parties to have disclosed the sources of funding it received via the electoral bonds route. Future Gaming and Hotel Services Pvt Ltd contributed ₹509 crore to the party between 2019 and 2023, accounting for 77 per cent of the ₹656.5 crore received by the party through electoral bonds in that period. While there is no way to determine which other parties Martin funded until the State Bank of India (SBI) reveals the unique alphanumeric number corresponding to each bond, what we know is that out of bonds worth ₹12,769 crore cashed in by political parties in the last five years, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accounted for 47.46 per cent of the total value, followed by the Trinamool Congress (TMC) at 12.60 per cent, and Congress at 11.13 per cent. Martin’s company also donated ₹100 crore to Prudent Electoral Trust in 2021, of which the largest share went to BJP.
Once a dear friend of DMK, Martin even produced the late Dravidian patriarch M Karunanidhi’s 75th script, a film called Ilaignan (2011). At the time, he ran SS Music, a south Indian music channel that nearly got acquired by MTV. Martin’s proximity to DMK is said to have irked then Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, who banned lotteries in the state in 2003 and had him arrested in connection with a land grab case in Salem in 2011—though this wasn’t his first brush with the law. The Martin family has since diversified its political risk. In 2014, his wife Leema Rose Martin joined the Indhiya Jananayaga Katchi (IJK), a new outfit led by SRM Group of Institutions founder TR Pachaimuthu that became part of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). (In 2012, she had accused Karunanidhi’s daughter Selvi of trying to extort ₹2 crore from the Martin family and of framing him in a false illegal lottery case.) In 2015, Martin’s son Charles Jose Martin joined BJP. His son-in-law Aadhav Arjuna, a basketball player who was part of political strategist Prashant Kishor’s I-PAC, is said to have played a crucial role in designing DMK’s campaign for the 2021 Assembly elections, which it won. Sources say he was close to Stalin’s son-in-law Sabareesan and continued to consult for the party on strategic issues even after the DMK government came to power. Last year, however, he abruptly joined the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK), a pro-Dalit party with two MPs in Parliament, which is a DMK ally. According to party leader and MP D Ravikumar, Arjuna approached VCK President Thol Thirumavalavan about a year ago, expressing solidarity with the party’s anti-caste stance. While his request to be fielded in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls was denied, Arjuna has managed to bag another coveted post—that of president of the Basketball Federation of India. Arjuna’s premises were among the many locations connected to Martin that were raided by the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) recently.
If the rags-to-riches story of a labourer from Myanmar who started distributing and later printing lottery tickets in Coimbatore in the late 1980s is remarkable, then that of his vertiginous rise to becoming the sole distributor for several lotteries is thriller-worthy
Nearly every member of Martin’s immediate family, including his second son Martin Jose Daison, brother-in-law John Kennedy, and daughter Daisy, are directors of about 20 companies and partners in several others. Their social media accounts are all about CSR initiatives, social work, and philanthropy, punctuated by the occasional new Rolls Royce, a birth in the family, and footage from their homoeopathy college and their mansions. Seen through a glass darkly, these companies, with names like Scintillating Villas Pvt Ltd, DPF Textiles Pvt Ltd, Charles Property Developers Pvt Ltd, Dominant Skyscrapers, Martin Happy Home, and Martin Farms Pvt Ltd, seem like legitimate real estate businesses until you start to wonder where the capital came from and chase the trail of crumbs down to the not-so-secret lair that is the business of lottery. If the rags-to-riches story of a labourer from Myanmar who started distributing and later printing lottery tickets in Coimbatore in the late 1980s is remarkable, then that of his vertiginous rise to becoming the sole distributor for several lotteries is downright thriller-worthy. Anyone who has ever bought a lottery ticket in Northeast India has likely been an unwitting participant in Santiago Martin’s rise to fame and power. He made precocious forays into Nagaland, Sikkim, West Bengal, Mizoram, Punjab, Maharashtra, Kerala, Bihar, Jharkhand and other states where lotteries were legal, bidding for distributing and marketing government lottery tickets. Selling hope to millions every day, he quickly made millions in return, much of it quasi-legal and allegedly illegal.
Martin cartelised the lottery industry like no one else before him, bidding collusively with other companies to land contracts. There were irregularities in the numbering and distribution of tickets, resulting in unclaimed prizes landing in his lap. He also allegedly helped his family and friends bag prizes unfairly, with reports surfacing of TMC leaders and their kin claiming prizes of ₹1 crore on multiple occasions from the Dear Lottery run by Future Gaming. “There is definitive evidence of foul play in dozens of cases where people close to the Martins have landed large prizes. But there was no political will to pursue cases of cheating against him,” says a CBI source, on condition of anonymity. “There are two things Martin doesn’t like—to be told to stay in his lane, and to fight it out with competitors. Why make enemies when you can make tens of thousands of crores year after year and share the bounty?” says a source from Kolkata who has worked with Martin. Martin is said to have greased many palms in government and law enforcement to turn a blind eye to the irregularities in the business. In 2015, when his protégé Pari Rajan was arrested in Bengaluru for selling illegal lottery tickets in Karnataka— the state banned lotteries in 2007 after it took note of the irregularities in Martin’s business there—three police officers were suspended for their ties to him and many others were suspected to have helped Rajan run the racket. There are allegations against Martin in Punjab, too, where he is accused of making ₹900 crore illegally by bribing the administration to get preferential treatment in lottery contracts.
IN 2010, BASED on a complaint by the Kerala government, a cheating case was registered against Martin for allegedly failing to ensure the authenticity of lottery tickets and remitting unclaimed prize money to the government of Sikkim. As many as 32 cases were registered against him across Kerala and the investigation was handed over to CBI in 2011. The chargesheet, filed in 2014, revealed that Martin’s company had allegedly defrauded the Sikkim government to the tune of ₹4,500 crore in 2009-10. Sikkim banned online lotteries for two years but once the ban was lifted, Martin and his associates swung into action once again. In 2017, the CAG’s Performance Audit of Nagaland state lotteries for the period April 2010 to March 2016 noted that the way the lottery was organised “distorts the distinction between an equal opportunity scheme and gambling”, with “undue financial benefit” accruing to the marketing agent (that is, Future Gaming). “Out of the total sales of ₹17,653.76 crore during 2010-16, the distributor deposited only ₹56.93 crore to the Consolidated Fund of the State,” the report said. It also noted the collusion among all four bidders for the state lottery contract: “Managing Director of M/s Future Gaming Solutions India Pvt. Ltd. and M/s Divyajyoti distributors Pvt. Ltd. were the same person. One of the Board members of M/s Divyajyoti distributors Pvt. Ltd. was also the Managing Director of M/s Pooja Fortune Pvt. Ltd. M/s M.J. Associate is an associate of both M/s Future Gaming Solutions India Pvt. Ltd. and M/s Gaming India distributors Ltd. The Financial Accounts of M/s M.J. Associate was signed by MDs of Future Gaming and Gaming India as partners.” The 2017 CAG’s Performance Audit report on Sikkim state lotteries, too, noted that “the award of marketing contract of the state’s lotteries to various lottery MAs (marketing agents) was characterised by lack of transparency, frequent extensions of contract without competitive bidding and considerable delay in finalisation of tenders that led to huge loss of revenue to the state.”
In 2019, the year Future Gaming started buying up electoral bonds, the Union home ministry alerted eight lottery-running states about the alleged “frauds” and “irregularities” linked to Martin’s companies. Despite the many cases lodged against Martin, and investigations by CBI, CID, and ED, Martin has largely stayed out of jail, seemingly by using money to convince governments to go easy on him. For instance, in 2007, amidst a crackdown on illegal lotteries by the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala, Martin, who was selling Sikkim lotteries in the state, donated ₹2 crore to the party’s mouthpiece Deshabhimani in what came as a major embarrassment to then Chief Minister VS Achuthanandan. He is also accused of selling temple land that he had allegedly usurped to Karunanidhi’s son MK Alagiri’s wife for a pittance.
Martin’s empire is said to be worth ₹40,000 crore and he is estimated to have caused a loss of over ₹7,500 crore to the exchequer. He has been under ED’s scanner for decades, with the agency seizing hundreds of crores of rupees in several raids under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. Last year, ED froze ₹457 crore in movable and immovable assets following a string of raids in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. Through it all, the family has denied any wrongdoing and kept up a façade of legitimacy, claiming that they are some of the largest individual taxpayers in India. It is only now that we know they are also one of the largest donors to Indian political parties.
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