ONLY one of this week's three winning ticket-holders in the British National Lottery had come forward to claim a share of the record £42 million jackpot payout by last night.
The lottery company, Camelot, said the other two winners, who may be individuals or consortia, had still not contacted officials and might be unaware of their new-found fortune.
All three tickets will win £14 million after double rollover lottery mania swept Britain with -queues snaking from terminals in supermarkets and newsagents and the prize total soaring to £81,436,302.
Whoever had won, had chosen no publicity after contacting Camelot via the telephone hotline some time after the draw on Saturday night, a spokeswoman said.
Officials refused to confirm where the declared winner or winners were from but said a Camelot winners' adviser had already begun counselling sessions.
Lottery computers worked through the night to calculate the exact breakdown of the winnings after the massive sale of tickets, -which at one point on Saturday reached £5,000 a second.
Some 53 lottery players had picked five of the six winning numbers - which were 2, 3, 4, 13, 42, 44 - as well the bonus ball 24, winning £104,747 each.
Camelot pointed out that an estimated £39 million will go to good causes. The Prime Minister, Mr Major, one of the few not to have a flutter - dismissed criticism from church leaders of the lottery and insisted it brought in hundreds of millions of pounds for good causes.
But the Bishop of Coventry, the Right Rev Simon Barrington-Ward, renewed calls from some church leaders for the Lottery to be abolished.
"I would like to see it abolished, but I would also like to see the prizes reduced and that is the more realistic of the two options at the moment," he said.
"It has become a mania. To have a state-organised thing on that scale offering these ridiculous prizes and sweeping the country, we are told, with frenzy, seems to me-to be a corrupting influence on our society." - (PA)