Vietnamese-American wins $55 mln jackpot trial After a week-long trial, the District 1 People’s Court in HCMC today announced that Vietnamese-American Ly Sam won the case in which he claimed that a city-based casino pay him the US$55.5 million he won while gambling in 2009. This afternoon the court judged that defendant Dai Duong Company, which owns the Palazzo Club at the five-star Sheraton Saigon Hotel, has to pay Sam, a 61-year-old businessman, the exact winning amount $55,542,291.70, which is equivalent to more than VND1,154 billion. As the losing party, Dai Duong has to pay the court fee of over VND1.2 billion, the court said, adding that it would return to Sam mroe than VND567 million he had paid in advance as part of the court fee. The court rejected Dai Duong’s argument that the winining result was “invalid” due to “some fault” with game machine No. 13 that Sam played at the club on October 25, 2009.  The court said that the winning amount was shown on the screen of the game machine and that there was no error report issued by the machine. Therefore, Dai Duong is responsible for paying the prize to the winner. The defendant’s lawyer told the court that Dai Duong had sent the printed circuit board (PCB) of machine No. 13 abroad for technical verification to identify the maximum prize that was fixed for the machine. According to the verification, the maxinum prize from the machine No. 13 where Sam played was only US$46,000, the lawyer said. However, the court rejected the argument, saying that it was unacceptable for Dai Duong to remove the PCB from the machine and sent it abroad without Sam’s witness and consent and without any supervision of any concerned agencies. From L: Two representatives of the plaintiff and two representatives of the defendant in court on January 7, 2013 (Photo: Tuoi Tre) Therefore, the result of the verification could not be considered as evidence in the case, the court said. As previously reported, when the machine reported that he won the huge cash prize, Sam asked the club to make a report to confirm the winning result but the club’s manager refused to do so, just promising to pay the prize to the winner within three days. Sam himself made a report on his winning and many other game players at the club put their signatures on the minutes as witnesses. He also took some photos of the machine that reported the wining result. On October 30, 2009, Sam sent Dai Duong a letter asking for the prize but the company did not respond. In another letter to Dai Duong a month later, Sam stressed that the company had to be responsible for paying the prize. Ewarton Consultancy Co., Ltd, an affiliate of Dai Duong, later replied to Sam that “the winning result was invalid because it had resulted from something wrong that happened to the game machine.” Dai Duong just agreed to pay Sam $300, the amount of money he spent for gambling at the casino because according to current regulations, if a machine has technical problems, the casino will refund customers. Not accepting such an argument, Sam has sued Dai Duong to court. TuoitreNews