City profiles

Francis Egan

Cuadrilla’s CEO is fracking’s “biggest fan”, and he’s on a roll, said The Sunday Telegraph. The Government has given the go-ahead for the company to explore for shale gas in Lancashire, overruling the objections of local councillors. No wonder Egan is “buzzing with his trademark enthusiasm”. Cuadrilla, whose name is Spanish for “friends having a drink together”, was founded by Birmingham University geologists 30 years ago. Egan, an oil industry veteran, had a baptism of fire after joining in 2012, said The Guardian: he never imagined the role would involve “death threats” and people turning up at his house “trying to frack his garden”. Clearly, he believes the pain was worth it: “This could be an absolute game changer,” he says – “one of the biggest gas resources in Europe.”

Denise Coates

Bet365, the gambling empire founded by Denise Coates, has paid its highest-earning executive more than £54m this year, said Robert Watts in The Sunday Times. “The name of the recipient was not made public”, but “the giant pay cheque was almost certainly received” by Coates, 49, who founded the Stoke-based betting giant 16 years ago and is still its “driving force”. It is probably the highest payout ever made to a female executive in British business. Coates, who owns around 50% of the firm, is CO-CEO alongside her brother, John, said Forbes. She started out crunching numbers at her father’s betting shops while still at school and, after launching Bet365 at the height of the dot-com boom, has never looked back. She’s reckoned to be worth around $3.6bn.