The Daily Telegraph

Bet365 tycoon handed one of the UK’S biggest ever paydays

- By Oliver Gill

THE billionair­e gambling tycoon Denise Coates was handed one of Britain’s biggest ever paydays again last year – despite a fall in profits at her betting empire.

Denise Coates was paid a £213m salary and a £45m dividend in the year to March 2022 by her company Bet365, which she set up in a Portakabin in Stoke-on-trent two decades ago.

Ms Coates’ salary was down from £250m the year before, after the business piled money into internatio­nal expansion instead of taking it as profit.

It is the second year that the amount paid to Ms Coates, Bet365 chief executive and one of Britain’s richest women, has fallen. She was given a salary of £421m in the year to March 2020.

Bet365 lays claim to be “the largest mobile sports wagering brand in the world”. The company now employs more than 6,000 people.

The sprawling business is a far cry from the website Ms Coates set up with brother John by mortgaging her father’s betting shops to secure a £15m loan from Royal Bank of Scotland in 2001.

In a rare interview with her local newspaper, she once said: “I was convinced early on that gambling would work on the internet.”

The company’s profits were hit by a slump in stock markets and big spending on advertisin­g as Bet365 seeks to expand into lucrative new markets

such as the US – which is in the process of repealing a decades-long ban on sports betting. Pre-tax profit fell from £469m to £50m in the year to March 2022, according to corporate filings published on Friday.

Bet365 and the Coates family rank among Britain’s biggest taxpayers as well as being significan­t donors to the Labour Party. Filings reveal that Bet365’s total tax contributi­on fell from £516m to £493m.

Bet365 has faced repeated claims that it generates a large proportion of its revenue from China – a country where citizens are routinely arrested and sent to prison for placing bets.

In line with previous years, Ms Coates and her fellow directors said that it would be “severely prejudicia­l to the interests of the group” if Bet365 were to provide a geographic­al breakdown of where it makes its money.

The company has asserted that operating a China-accessible website outside China and remotely supplying its services into China is not against the law.

Ms Coates, now 55, worked part-time in her father Peter’s chain of betting shops – which would ultimately be pivotal to his daughter’s success. After she graduated with a first class honours degree in econometri­cs (the statistica­l branch of economics) from Sheffield University, Ms Coates returned to the family business in 1995.

She was convinced that the internet was ripe for sports betting as it would allow a much broader range of punters to be attracted if they could gamble from home rather than venturing to betting shops.

She once said: “We mortgaged the betting shops and put it all online. We were the ultimate gamblers, if you like.”

In an interview in 2012 when asked why Bet365 had chosen to base itself in Stoke, Ms Coates said: “It’s a simple answer: it’s where I’m from.

“We began in a Portakabin on a car park near one of the betting shops. It’s to a large extent down to an accident of birth … As to why we have stayed here when every other major competitor is based in a lower tax jurisdicti­on, that’s a more difficult question to answer logically.”

 ?? ?? Denise Coates, who set up Bet365 in a Portakabin, was paid a salary of £213m
Denise Coates, who set up Bet365 in a Portakabin, was paid a salary of £213m

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