Next month: April 2006
Unfortunately, there appears to be a currency conversion discrepancy between the unwon jackpot figure in Euros quoted by the Austrian and Irish official sites (the latter only in an irritatingly ignorable tiny scrolling Java applet - yes, the main place in the page where they put the jackpot up still says the pre-draw estimate of 35,000,000 Euros as I type this...grrr - stupid Irish Webmasters have two different jackpot figures on their results page!) as 39,080,313 Euros and the UK official site's sterling figure of £26,351,576.
So how do I know there's a discrepancy? Well, for every single week since Euro Millions began, you can divide the sterling pounds UK figure by the Euros figure and get back the number of pounds per Euro and this figure is always on a 0.01 pence boundary. Take last week's figures: £18,470,476 / 26,842,720 Euros = 68.81000 pence per Euro.
Now look at this week's figures: £26,351,573 / 39,080,313 Euros = 67.42928 pence per Euro, which is clearly well away from the 0.01 pence boundary. Also note that the Euro exchange rate would have to drop by 1.38 pence per Euro in the space of 7 days, which is a massive drop rarely seen in any of the previous currency conversions I've done. I phoned Camelot to double-check their pounds sterling figure and they confirmed it for me, so I wondered if there was a typo on the Austrian/Irish side of things.
So, I suspected that the Euros figure was too high and the easiest typo would be 1m Euros too much, so let's try that calculation instead: £26,351,573 / 38,080,313 Euros = 69.20000 pence per Euro, bang on the 0.01 pence boundary. It also is a more "sensible" rise of 0.39 pence per Euro from last week and not too far from www.xe.net's current exchange rate of 68.9937 pence per Euro either. The only conclusion I can come to is that Austria and Ireland have got it wrong by 1m Euros and the UK figure is correct.
Previous month: February 2006