The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Sikkim has declared a war on the alleged illegal lottery and Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX) scams in the state. The national ruling party said the Himalayan state has suffered losses due to one person operating the state lotteries exclusively for the last 25 years.

Addressing a press conference,  the spokesperson, Dr. Raju Giri, has said they have done all the research and they even have proof on lottery irregularities. The party will now start legal action against those who are behind this. Sikkim has allegedly suffered losses of thousands of crores as a result of mismanagement at the Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX) and state lotteries.

He added that there is a process of tender for the lottery which has been manipulated so that only one person has been getting that tender since 1995 and has been earning hundreds of crores with the state receiving only 0.40% revenue from it. Coimbatore based Future Gaming owns lottery distribution rights of Sikkim government lotteries.

Dr. Giri informed that as per the CAG report of 2016-17, which was also presented in the Assembly, from 2010 to 2016 the state government organized 44,834 draws of various lotteries and the audit observed many lapses in the lottery operation of the state relating to monitoring, maintenance of records and deposits of revenue, operation of lottery schemes and others.

It is worth noting that the Sikkim High Court on April 19 dismissed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) that alleged loss of revenue to the State of Sikkim in the backdrop of an invoice/bill dated 26th June 2017 while conducting lottery during the last agreement period entered into by the state and Future Gaming.

Enforcement Directorate (ED) is investigating multiple cases of money laundering by Santiago Martin, the owner of Future Gaming  and has attached several hundreds of crores with latest attachment of INR 173 crores on July 2. In April, ED attached properties worth INR 400 crores belonging to Future Gaming.