Tiger Pools Korea, which is currently mired in a bribery scandal, is doing exceptionally well business wise with its Sports Toto lottery football pool, due to strong performances by the national team. TPK announced Thursday that it garnered revenue of W420 million on sales of soccer-related lottery products released for the May 26 match against World Cup holder's France, its highest ever since opening in March 2001.

The lottery allows buyers to bet on the scores of football matches and has been run nine times since the beginning of the year and TPK enjoyed continuous sales growth up to W338million in its fourth issue for Korea's match against Turkey on March 27. However, the bribery scandal saw sales plummet to arouns W200 million for lotteries issued for matches against Costa Rica (April 20), China (April 27) and Scotland (May 16).

With the Team Korea crushing Scotland 4-1, sales picked up to W370 million for the games against England on May 21. A person betting W30,000 correctly on the half time and full time scores in the Korea match with France won W10.8million in return.

(Lee Gil-seong, atticus@chosun.com )