Denise Coates, the multibillionaire founder and boss of the gambling firm Bet365, paid herself £265m last year in a record-breaking pay deal for the chief executive of a British company.
The huge pay package, which equates to nearly £726,000 a day, dwarfs the previous UK record set by Coates when she collected £217m a year earlier.
Coates was paid a base salary of £220,004,000 in the year to March 2018, accounts filed at Companies House on Wednesday reveal. On top of this, she collected dividend payments of £45m from her more than 50% shareholding in the Stoke-based company.
Her pay is more than 9,500 times the average UK salary, 1,700 times that collected by the prime minister and more than double that paid to the entire Stoke City football team, which Bet365 owns and which was relegated from the Premier League last season. Coates’s pay is also 27 times that earned by Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, the world’s most valuable company.
Vince Cable, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said Coates’ “eye-watering pay package” was “irresponsible and excessive”.
“In any circumstance it is hard to justify, but more so given the money comes from people struggling with compulsive gambling,” Cable said. “This is an industry body needing tighter regulation. We have started high-stake gaming machines. We now need to move into online gambling, and curbing the advertising around it.”
Luke Hildyard, a director of the High Pay Centre, said: “Why does someone who is already a billionaire need to take such an obscene amount of money out of their company? It is difficult to find a reason beyond pure greed.
“A payment of this size would be impossible to justify for someone whose business was in unquestionably life-enhancing products or services. It is doubly offensive when awarded to a betting company CEO at a time when problem gambling is spiralling out of control.”
Coates, who started out as a cashier marking up results in betting shops owned by her father before taking control and turning it into one of the world’s largest gambling groups, did not comment on the size of her pay. She told shareholders: “Increased remuneration for individuals [has] been key to the development of the overarching corporate strategy that has successfully driven the group forward.”
In Bet365’s accounts, she said: “I am pleased to report that the group continued to experience significant growth during the period, with overall revenue and operating profit increasing year-on-year by 25% to £2.9bn and 31% to £660m, respectively.”
Even before the bumper pay day, Coates and her family were listed as the 21st richest in Britain with a £5.8bn fortune – more than Sir Richard Branson with £4.5bn or easyJet’s Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou with £3bn.
Coates, 51, who keeps herself out of the public eye and very rarely gives media interviews, owns just over 50% of the company. With the rest of her family – including her brother John (co-chief executive), husband Richard Smith (a Stoke City director) and father (chair of Stoke City) – she controls 93% of Bet365.
The total pay to Bet365’s directors and “key management personnel” was £449m, up from £322m a year earlier. Salaries are high across the board at Bet 365, with its 4,030 employees sharing £648m, which works out at £161,000 each if shared equally.
After graduating with a first-class degree in econometrics – the application of statistical methods to economic data – from Sheffield University, Coates expanded the family’s Provincial Racing shops chain to nearly 50 betting shops. As the millennium approached, she decided the future of betting lay online and bought the Bet365.com domain on eBay for $25,000 (£19,000), a move that catapulted her and her family up the UK wealth league.
She was awarded a CBE in 2012 for services to the community and business, and has become known as the “patron of the Potteries” for her decision to continue to base Bet365 in Stoke, where it is the largest private-sector employer. “We mortgaged the betting shops and put it all into online,” she said at the time. “We knew the industry required big startup costs but we gambled everything on it.”
Bet365’s customers wagered almost £52.3bn last year – £5.5bn more than the year earlier. The company’s TV ads are fronted by the actor Ray Winstone and broadcast during high-profile sporting events.
The revelation of Coates’ huge pay comes as an official report says the number of problem gambling children has quadrupled in two years. An audit by the Gambling Commission found there were 55,000 problem gamblers aged 11-16, and a further 70,000 young people at risk.
The report, published on Wednesday, found that 450,000 children – one in seven of the total – bet regularly on fruit machines, online, in betting shops or at bingo. All gambling is illegal for under-18s.
Mike Dixon, the chief executive of the addiction charity Addaction, said: “It’s astonishing that a CEO of one gambling company is paid 26 times more than the entire industry’s contribution to [addiction] treatment. We know problem gambling affects more than 2 million people. We need a proper levy on gambling industry profits so more people can get help and support.”
bet365 made a £75m donation to the Denise Coates Foundation, which mostly funds medical and education charities. The charity has not made any donations to gambling or addiction charities.
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