A WAITER who “dreamt” of winning the Lottery and scooped a £1 million jackpot the next day has fought off a legal bid by his boss for all the winnings from their jointly-purchased ticket.

Fatih Ozcan, who worked at York’s Kapadokya Turkish restaurant, had a vision of a large bundle of cash with his boss, Hayati Kucukkoylu, standing in front of him in January 2012.

Mr Ozcan persuaded his boss to join him in buying a Lottery ticket, but when their Euromillions ticket won the seven-figure prize, Mr Kucukkoylu claimed the lot for himself and triggered a bitter legal dispute.

A top judge at London’s Civil Appeal Court has now upheld an earlier ruling that the pair must take an equal cut of the winnings.

Lord Justice Pitchford said Mr Kucukkoylu’s bid to challenge the 50/50 split had “no real prospect of success”.

Ruling on the case last year, Judge Mark Gosnell said Mr Ozcan “had a dream” on the night of January 29, 2012.

“He dreamt he was holding a large bundle of cash and, standing in front of him, was his boss.

“Mr Ozcan is a strong believer in the power of dreams and interpreted this to mean that he and Mr Kucukkoylu would win the Lottery”, he said.

The next day, Mr Ozcan “pestered” his employer for several hours before he relented, passing Mr Ozcan coins from the restaurant’s till to go toward the purchase.

The waiter bought the winning ticket at the nearby Budgens store and his precognition proved accurate.

However, Mr Kucukkoylu, 47, said he’d paid the entire stake and chosen the winning numbers, claiming the winnings should be his alone.

Mr Ozcan argued that his bedtime premonition was what prompted them to buy a ticket and contended that he’d paid half the £9 total cost of the ticket.

He later complained to police, alleging Mr Kucukkoylu had “stolen his winning Lottery ticket from his jacket pocket”.

He told Lottery operators Camelot the same story. Mr Kucukkoylu was arrested and held for nine hours before he was eventually released without charge.

Mr Ozcan later admitted making the bogus allegation because he wanted to stop his boss from “getting his hands” on the cash and “sending it back to Turkey”.

Judge Gosnell found that the men each played an equal part in the win and that each had paid half the stake.

On appeal, Mr Kucukkoylu’s barrister, Mark Cannon QC, yesterday argued that Judge Gosnell “failed to understand the significance” of text messages that had passed between the pair.

But Lord Justice Pitchford said: “In my view, this argument has no real prospect of success.

“The judge acknowledged that the weight of the texts appeared to support Mr Kucukkoylu’s case and Mr Ozcan’s explanation of them depended on the judge’s conclusion as to the nature of the relationship between them.

“Rightly, in my view, the judge concluded, in the end, that the texts were equivocal.

“He assessed that he had to rely on other factors to determine whether the ticket was purchased jointly.

“This led him to prefer the evidence of Mr Ozcan on a number of significant issues, including the texts. There is no reasonable argument that the judge misunderstood the import of the text evidence.

“The conclusions he reached were properly open to him and I see no real prospect of the Court of Appeal reaching a different conclusion.

“For that reason, the application must be dismissed,” Lord Justice Pitchford concluded.