What are the odds? Bet365 made a £72million loss last year, while the boss Denise Coates made £271million in pay and dividends.
Ms Coates, Britain’s richest women and best-paid boss, was pulling in the equivalent of £742,000 a day as her total earnings since 2014 hit £2.3billion.
Ms Coates, whose fortune is now estimated at £6.2billion, set up Bet365 from a portable cabin in a car park in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs, in 2000. She is now listed among the UK’s biggest tax payers, she and her family estimated to have paid £460.2million into the Exchequer last year.
Bet365 said it also gave £100million last year to the Denise Coates Foundation. The charity’s latest accounts show it had committed to £11million of grants and donations during the year. Bet365 made an annual loss of £72.6m, from a £49.8m profit the previous year. The swing into the red was fuelled by expansion abroad and losses at Stoke City Football Club, which it owns.
Think tank the High Pay Centre said that Ms Coates’ bumper pay package was not fair or appropriate. Luke Hildyard, its executive director, said: “People deserve to be rewarded for innovation and success, but there’s a question of what’s sensible and proportionate. Nobody becomes a multi-billionaire in isolation from wider society.
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“In this case, the wealth depends on money coming out of gamblers’ pockets, the efforts of thousands of staff, plus wider factors like people having some disposable income, a secure and reliable internet network or all the infrastructure that goes into staging sports events.”
Bet365 headquarters in Etruria (Pete Stonier / Stoke Sentinel)Publicity-shy Ms Coates and her husband Richard Smith lived for years in a farmhouse near Stoke-on-Trent. But the couple hired Lord Norman Foster’s architectural practice to design a futuristic steel and glass mansion in rural Cheshire. Set in 52 acres, the £90million estate is said to include a sunken tennis court, stables, ornamental gardens, workers’ cottages and a boathouse.
Ms Coates once said in a rare interview: “I was convinced early on that gambling would work well on the internet. It is private, accessible and allows you to present a huge range of betting opportunities to customers.”
Yet the growth of internet betting has triggered concerns about the destructive impact on problem gamblers. In its accounts, Bet365 said it “continued to invest significantly” in what it calls safer gambling. That includes improvements to the group’s Early Risk Detection System.
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