Karl Crompton has been spotted getting his hands dirty on a building site, 25 years after his big Lotto win saw him crowned Britain’s most eligible bachelor.
In the first pictures of him for 14 years, bearded Karl – sporting a casual khaki T-shirt and black shorts – runs around with a wheelbarrow of cement on the Blackpool site.
He was also seen getting behind the wheel of a black Land Rover Discovery, reports The Mirror. It’s just one of the expensive cars he has acquired since winning £10.9 million in 1996 – 18 months after the National Lottery was first launched.
Karl was just 23 when he hit the jackpot but has shrewdly gone on to build a buy-to-let property empire, doubling his fortune to £22 million. After his life-changing win, Karl was dubbed Britain’s most eligible bachelor – but he went on to marry girlfriend Nicole Roach a decade later.
The millionaire is now thought to have split from his wife, however, and moved out of the mansion he built in Fylde, Lancs. In a 2009 interview with the Sunday Mirror, Karl told how he had ploughed all of his winnings into property.
The mansion had a large pond in the gardens and his parents, Keith and Pat, lived in a property at the front. Karl, who used to be a trainee at Comet earning £100-a-week, also splashed out on another home in Vancouver, Canada.
He revealed that it was his mum who suggested he should buy a ticket for the fateful £22 million Lotto rollover draw in 1996. Karl told the Sunday Mirror: “My mum and dad and brother helped pick some numbers then I went out with my pals.
The next morning, I came downstairs to the kitchen and my mum said, ‘You’re looking at a lottery winner. I’ve got four numbers and got £96 or something.’
“So I looked at the numbers and my ticket. Even when Camelot later confirmed the numbers, I couldn’t believe I’d won. “It was £10,903,198 – a half share of the full Lotto rollover prize.”
