Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel III said Sunday that he would file a resolution to investigate the “suspicious” result of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes’ (PCSO) 6/55 Grand Lotto draw that led to 433 winners dividing the P236 million jackpot.

“I will file a resolution to investigate this. Because this is my concern, this a gambling activity like the casino or the POGO (Philippine Offshore Gaming Operations)...These are gambling games authorized by the state so they should have integrity,” Pimentel told dzBB.

“So that’s our purpose. We will find out, we will make sure these games have integrity. We will survey normal citizens, statisticians, professors and PCSO so we can understand what happened,” he added.

“Maybe we will conduct a hearing to ask PCSO if these winners are lucky pick winners,'' he said.

Pimentel said the chances of winning the Grand Lotto was supposed to be “one in how many billions”.

“That means it’s supposed to be that hard. Then, to say that there are 433 people who won? There is something suspicious,” he said.

Pimentel said that having 433 lotto winners was a “very rare event”.

“We have to look at the entire system of our lotto games. This is a good chance because many people are questioning the results,” Pimentel said.

On Saturday, PCSO announced that 433 bettors guessed the winning combination of 09-45-36-27-18-54. The winners were able to get more than P500,000 each. Jaspearl Tan/DMS