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$4.1M lottery win a loss for former friends

[Enone Rosas won $4.163 million playing Lotto 6/49 in 2007 / THE CANADIAN PRESS]

A lottery winner who claimed she lent — as opposed to gave — $600,000 to a friend in a fit of generosity has been vindicated in B.C. Supreme Court.

But sadly for Enone Rosas, the same judge who decided she was owed money also ruled that she waited too late to collect.

The best of times

In a decision which serves as a parable both about friendship and the importance of writing things down, Justice Marguerite Church details the sad demise of the friendship Rosas once enjoyed with her friend Hermenisabel Toca.

The two Filipina immigrants had known each other since they met at a school in Canada in 2004. Their husbands became friends as well, and the couple would play cards together two or three times a week.

Fittingly, Toca and Rosas were hanging out on a day off when Rosas decided to check a lottery ticket at Oakridge mall in January 2007.

It was Toca who tried to calm her good friend down at a nearby food court after Rosas learned she had won $4.163 million.

Even her husband didn’t believe the news at first.

In the days that followed, Rosas called friends to share her good fortune — quite literally. She offered to double the salary of one old pal and pay off the debts of another.

And within hours of collecting her winnings, Rosas went to the Royal Bank to draw up three drafts, the largest of which was $630,000 destined for Toca.

Toca and her husband bought a house with the money. The friends all went to West Edmonton mall together to celebrate.

Little did they know that dark clouds were looming.

The worst of times

Rosas admitted that $30,000 of the money she gave to Toca was a gift, but insisted the rest of the cash was a loan.

She claimed Toca said she would repay the money “next year” without giving a specific date.

To back her up, Rosas called Royal Bank manager Shirley Ma to testify.

“Ma testified that her bank has certain protocols in place when dealing with lottery winners and in her 20 years of work for the Royal Bank of Canada, she has only had to employ those protocols on two occasions, one of which was for the plaintiff, Enone Rosas,” the judge wrote.

Ma recalled the size of the draft Rosas wrote for her friend “and she testified that the plaintiff indicated to her that ‘the larger one she was lending to a friend for the purchase of a home.”

Toca claimed the entire amount was a gift, but Church said that was unlikely considering that Rosas had given a much smaller amount to a friend she had known much longer who was godmother to one of her children.

Counsel for the defendant argued that a “$600,000 loan without a shred of paper makes no sense.”

But the judge found in favour of Rosas, a woman with little education who now runs rental properties without any rental agreements.

The matter of the 'loan’ decided, the judge turned her attention to the terms of repayment. Was it a term loan with a fixed date for repayment or a loan contingent on when Toca could afford to pay?

Rosas had been unshakeable in her conviction that Toca had promised to pay all of the money back “next year" — regardless of her actual ability to pay. It was a point Toca’s lawyer hammered home in cross-examination.

The judge said that effectively meant the money had been given out as a term loan. Which set the clock running exactly one year later — January 10, 2008 — for a six year limitation period to file a civil action on debt.

The limitation period ended on January 10, 2014. Rosas filed her claim six months later.