The £1billion woman
Huge 3-year payout to Bet365 chief as she earns another £258m despite profits fall
The ‘gambling queen’ behind Bet365 took home £258million last year – raising her pay for the past three to almost £1billion.
In one of Britain’s biggest paydays, Denise Coates was handed £213million in salary and £45million in dividends for the year to last March.
The 55-year-old scooped almost £300million in 2021 and £421million in 2020. Ms Coates, Britain’s highest paid woman, has earned around £979million in the past three years – the equivalent of £894,000 every day.
Bet365 handed out £339million to senior managers last year, including Ms Coates’ brother.
The Stoke- on-Trent based Coates family are estimated to be worth around £8.6billion.
They own Stoke City FC and are also Britain’s biggest taxpayers. Their business paid £481.7million in tax in 2021, according to the Sunday Times tax list.
Ms Coates’ payout comes in a year in which profits at Bet365 fell from £469million to £50million. After gaining a first class degree in econometrics, Ms Coates worked in betting shops owned by her father, Peter, who was the son of a miner. In the late 1990s she mortgaged the bookies to build the Bet365 website. She bought the domain name on eBay and launched the site in 2001. It grew rapidly and ran TV advertisements fronted by actor Ray Winstone.
The company is now a global leader with 80million users and more than 6,000 staff in Stokeon-Trent, Malta and Gibraltar.
Despite being arguably the UK’s most successful self-made businesswoman, Ms Coates seldom appears in the spotlight.
In a rare interview, she once said: ‘I really don’t enjoy the attention. The public side does not come naturally to me. I’m not saying I’m a shrinking violet. I’m not.
‘I’ve been bossy all my life. It’s just I very much enjoy actually running the business.’
But Ms Coates’ pay has drawn criticism, with antigambling campaigns suggesting her fortune is built on the misery of addicts.
Matt Zarb-Cousin, director of Clean Up Gambling, said yesterday: ‘ Online gambling firms obtain the majority of their profits from people who are addicted or at-risk.
‘These unaffordable losses are paying for these hugely inflated gambling fat cat salaries during a cost of living crisis.’
Former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith said it was ‘money made on damaged lives’.
‘Addicted or at-risk’