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OPAP, Turk partners to bid for Piyango lottery -CEO

Reuters - Monday, September 1

ATHENS, Aug 31 - Europe's biggest betting firm OPAP <OPAr.AT> plans to bid for Turkey's national lottery Milli Piyango in a joint venture with Turkish business groups, its chief executive said in a newspaper interview published on Sunday.

As betting markets around the world are liberalised, Greece's OPAP is looking for expansion opportunities to offset any loss of local market share after its monopoly rights expire in 2020.

"We want this project, we want to get into the largest market in southeast Europe, we have the ability to take over but we are not 'rabid' to do it at any cost," OPAP Chief Executive Christos Hadjiemmanuil told Lathimerini newspaper.

The privatisation of Turkey's national lottery Milli Piyango is set to proceed within weeks after regulatory work is completed, senior sources at the company and the Turkish sell-off authority told Reuters earlier in August.

Milli Piyango made sales of 459.8 million lira ($388.2 million) in 2008 and net profit of 331.8 million.

Apart from OPAP, other companies interested in the tender include Lottomatica <LTO.MI> unit GTech, Greece's Intralot <INLr.AT>, Turkey's Koc Group <KCHOL.IS>, Austrian Lotteries and U.S. firms Scientific Games and Camelot, sources said.

The sell-off is part of a wide privatisation programme Turkey is implementing to bring in much-needed foreign revenue to help ease a bloated current account deficit.

OPAP's CEO told the paper Turkish authorities were open to the idea of the Greek gaming group possibly taking over the lottery. "The climate we met was positive ... there was a friendly mood and open doors," Hadjiemmanuil said.

The paper said OPAP picked Turkish groups Dogus, which owns Garanti Bank, FIBA and contractor Alarco as its local partners and will set up a joint venture to bid in the tender next month.

"We chose excellent partners both from a business and financial adequacy perspective. Their participation by 50 percent will have a political and psychological weight."

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