Betting boss hits £469m salary jackpot
Her £54,000 an hour is Britain’s biggest ever pay packet
SHE is the woman who transformed her father’s small chain of betting shops into one of the world’s top gambling websites.
Now Denise Coates has hit the jackpot herself – by earning £469million.
The 53-year-old boss of Bet365 increased her annual pay by 45 per cent, taking her total earnings since 2016 to £1.3billion.
The mother-of-five took an eye-watering salary of £421million, topped up with a £48million dividend from her 50 per cent stake in the business.
The extraordinary payday means that, between April 2019 and March 2020, she earned the equivalent of £1.3million a day, or a record £54,000 an hour – although she did pay back an estimated £220million in tax.
Her pay packet was more than all of the salaries of the chief executives of Britain’s 100 largest listed companies put together.
In total, Bet365 handed out £607million to senior managers, including Mrs Coates’s brother John, 51. The figure is 699 times more than Bet365 donated to GambleAware, a charity working to reduce gambling harm in the UK.
The Stoke-on-Trent-based Coates family are estimated to be worth around £6.8billion, making Mrs Coates the UK’s fifth richest woman behind food packaging tycoons Marit and Kirsten Rausing,
‘It’s gross that anyone can pay themselves that’
brewery boss Charlene de CarvalhoHeineken and Kirsty Bertarelli, a former Miss UK and wife of a biotech billionaire.
The Coates family – who also own Stoke City FC – are Britain’s biggest taxpayers. Their business paid £615million to the Exchequer last year alone and the Denise Coates Foundation also handed out £85million in charitable donations.
After gaining a first class degree in econometrics, Mrs Coates worked in betting shops owned by her father, Peter, the son of a miner. In the late 1990s she saw that the future of the industry was online, and mortgaged the bookies to build the Bet365 website.
She bought the domain name on eBay and launched the site in 2001. It grew rapidly thanks to TV advertising fronted by actor Ray Winston. The company is now a global leader employing 5,100 staff at hubs in Stoke-on-Trent, Malta and Gibraltar.
However revelations about Mrs Coates’ enormous salary come amid growing fears about the impact of the pandemic on online gamblers.
Former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith said: ‘It’s gross that anyone should pay themselves that amount of money in a single year. This company is successful when people lose money and lives are changed and damaged.’
Tory MP Richard Holden, who spearheaded the public accounts committee’s inquiry into gambling regulation, said: ‘It’s clear that bumper pay comes from bumper profits, which are only likely to rise with huge amounts of gambling during the lockdown. It’s clearer than ever that proper regulation of gambling is needed immediately.’
The Coates family have also been criticised for not diverting more cash to fund gambling addiction therapy. In 2019/20 Bet365 pledged £868,000 to GambleAware, which collects donations for treatment and research, although this is expected to rise to around £14million this year.
Mrs Coates has spent some of her enormous wealth on a country estate, offering ‘silly money’ to buy up neighbours’ land for the £90million build in Cheshire.
Plans for her 52- acre home, included a lake, sunken tennis courts, stables, ornamental gardens, workers’ cottages and a boathouse. Her family are also said to use a helicopter, while Mrs Coates herself drives an Aston Martin DB9 sports car.
In the year to March 2020, Bet365 saw its revenues fall slightly to just under £2.8billion because of the cancellation of sporting fixtures. The amount paid out to senior managers, including Mrs Coates, increased from £428million in 2018/19 to £607million in 2019/20.
The early impact of the pandemic, the significant increase in executive pay and an £87million loss at Stoke City FC pushed profits down from £ 791million to £224million.
Rival bookmakers, including the owners of Ladbrokes Coral and Paddypower have seen their fortunes soar in the pandemic.
British companies, including Bet365, are also expanding rapidly in the US after a court decision liberalised online betting leading to a ‘gold rush’.