Truck Driver Can Keep $2M Lottery Win After Coworkers’ Legal Bid Fails

Posted on: January 15, 2025, 11:56h. 

Last updated on: January 15, 2025, 02:09h.

A lottery-winning truck driver from Surrey, Metro Vancouver will get to keep his $2 million windfall after a group of his colleagues failed to convince a judge they were entitled to a share.

Mandeep Singh Maan, BC Lottery, Balvinder Kaur Nagar, Sukhjinder Singh Sidhu, Binipal Singh Sanghera, Jeevan Pedan
Mandeep Sigh Maan, above, won’t have to share his $2 million jackpot with four coworkers who failed to prove they had been part of a lottery syndicate with the short-haul truck driver. (Image: Vancouver Sun)

Mandeep Singh Maan won the $2 million BC/49 jackpot in August 2023 and initially kept his stroke of good fortune to himself.

But when four coworkers who had been part of an informal lottery syndicate with Maan saw him posing with a $2 million check on the BC Lottery Corp’s website, they decided they wanted a piece of the pie.

The coworkers, Balvinder Kaur Nagar, Sukhjinder Singh Sidhu, Binipal Singh Sanghera, and Jeevan Pedan, sued Maan, each demanding a fifth of the jackpot.

The plaintiffs argued that all five men regularly bought lottery tickets together as part of a pool in 2021 and 2022, and Maan’s reluctance to tell them about the win was “suspicious.”

No Legal Entitlement

Justice Liliane Bantourakis determined Monday that while the plaintiffs “came to court with sincerely held belief in their entitlement to a share of the winnings,” they had failed to establish a legal entitlement to the money.

Bantourakis agreed with Maan’s claim that the ticket-pooling arrangement was “irregular” and “infrequent.”

The parties’ interactions leading up to and after the winning ticket purchase are disputed, the alleged lottery pool agreement was not set out in writing, and the documentary record is sparse,” she wrote in her decision.

The lottery pool had a WhatsApp group that showed just 16 lotto ticket purchases spanning 14 months. Meanwhile, Maan described himself as a lottery aficionado who spent around $400 a month on tickets.

BC Lottery records show the transaction at a Chevron gas station that involved the winning ticket was for just $12, which didn’t indicate a group purchase.

Story Unreliable

Bantourakis also found that an account by one of the plaintiffs that he had given Maan money to buy tickets was unreliable and filled with inconsistencies.

The fact that the parties bought lottery tickets together, even if they did so with frequency, is not sufficient to discharge the plaintiffs’ burden of proving on a balance of probabilities that they entered into a binding oral agreement with the defendant that would give them a claim over the winning ticket,” Bantouakis wrote.

She also found nothing “suspicious” about Maan’s behavior after winning the jackpot, which she said was “no more consistent with a guilty mind than an understandable, if unfortunate, concern over how his coworkers might react.”

“I’m so relieved right now,” Maan told The Vancouver Sun Monday. “The reputation of my family was on the line.”

He said he will continue to work at the same Surrey-based freight company because he “didn’t want to run away like a loser or a liar.”