Family celebrate $12m Lotto win

A Hawkes Bay family have claimed the weekend's $12 million Lotto win.

A female family member who claimed the prize said family members knew the jackpot was getting big, and had meant to buy a ticket for about three weeks, but kept running out of time.

"This week I didn't want to miss out, so I put 'Buy a Lotto ticket' on my 'to do' list and remembered to get one for Saturday's draw," she said.

Another family member said that as they watched the draw on Saturday night they wrote down the Lotto numbers, but missed out on getting the Powerball number down.

NZ Lotteries chief executive Trevor Hall said the man had said he watched as his partner checked the ticket against the numbers and then went silent, thinking she had won Lotto Division One.

"We must have checked the ticket about 100 times," the man said. "First we checked it against the numbers we had written down and then we went on to the NZ Lotteries website and checked it there."

It was then they realised they had become multimillionaires.

"I wasn't even thinking about Powerball, but when I looked at the site I looked at the Powerball number and said to my partner, 'Check that out'.

"I just couldn't believe it that we had won such a huge sum. Winning that amount of money was just out of this world."

Mr Hall said they wanted to share their win with family. The winning ticket was bought from Andrew Spence Pharmacy in Napier.

- NZPA