UK lottery winner eyes holiday home in Malta

One of the UK's biggest lottery winners plans to buy a holiday home in Malta with the £6.5 million she banked, leaving local tourism promoters and property negotiators rubbing their hands in glee.

Donna Rhodes, 39, could be anyone's neighbour when she starts to realise her dreams and spend her share of the £45.6 million, scooped by a seven-strong syndicate in last Friday's Euromillions draw.

The group of office workers, based in Merseyside, only formed the syndicate, the Magnificent Seven, four months ago. They do - or rather, did - IT work for Hewlett Packard, in Liverpool.

"I didn't have any holidays left and was due to work over Christmas so the best news is I won't have to any more. Instead, I can hand in my notice," said the mother of two teenage children. And possibly spend the festive season here...

"We'd love a little holiday home in Malta," Ms Rhodes, originally from County Durham but having spent the last decade in Liverpool, was quoted as saying in a Press Association article.

She could get a lot more than that, the Frank Salt Real Estate chairman speculated, calculating she was not likely to spend more than 10 per cent of her winnings on her holiday home, leaving her with a hefty €760,000 in her pocket for the property.

"That means she can get herself a super duper house: anything from a lovely farmhouse, with a swimming pool, to a luxury bungalow in Santa Maria Estate, or a Portomaso apartment," Frank Salt said.

"The reason she has chosen Malta is probably because she is an ordinary person like you and I, who comes here on holiday, has lots of friends and always dreamt of buying a home. Suddenly, she has the money and that is exactly what she is going to do!"

The president of the Federation of Estate Agents (Malta), Ian Casolani also welcomed Ms Rhodes's decision, saying this was what individual estate agents and the federation were constantly pushing for and what Malta can be all about.

"We're constantly working to promote its attractiveness and we know foreigners have a good feeling for it, choosing it as a place to retire, or even work from if they are not tied down to a particular country," said Mr Casolani, who is director of Belair Real Estate.

Ms Rhodes's choice may not be such a novelty but her lottery story had "even more romance to it and is definitely something to talk about", he said. Throwing a pinch of politics into the fairy tale, the estate agents, however, took the opportunity to express disgruntlement at property-related Budget measures, saying Ms Rhodes would end up paying a "horrendous and unfair" tax rate if she sold her house even after seven years.

While it was better than nothing, increasing from five to seven years the choice of whether to pay normal rates on capital gains or 12 per cent final withholding tax was "a joke in our face", they added.