Lottery tender offers started

“Today, on 20 June 2012 at 11:00, ended the deadline for handing the applications of the National Lottery competition”, declared Dorian Teliti, a secretary at the Ministry of Finances.

As it was hinted, only two companies were in the tender. The first offer came from the Austrian National Lottery, while the second came from a consortium made of three companies, the Italian Lottomatica, the Cypriot GTech and the Czech Synot.

The three companies that made the second offer are closely related to each other. The Cypriot GTech is part of the international group GTech Holding, 75% of which is owned by the Italian Lottomatica.

Lottomatica is part of the  De Agostini Group, in Italy. The Cypriot Synot is connected with both Lottomatica and GTech in many countries with common investments. The evaluation commission will review their validity and will give the final result. The tender process has been compromised by the public accusations made by one of the retired competitors, the Greek Intralot, which accused the government of creating procedures that lead to only one winner and excluding the others from the race.

But the biggest suspicions are related with the price that the license is sold, which is fixed at 3.5 million EUR, when countries with a population eight times smaller than Albania have sold the national lottery license at around 40 million EUR.

The price has surprised many experts, in a moment when the government has financial problems to the point of not paying the public works or by delaying the payments for the people in need.

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