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Dennis Coates, president of Bet365, founded the gambling company in 2000.
CNN
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The founder and boss of gambling firm Bet365 earned a salary of around $281m (£221m) in the last financial year – ending 26 March 2023. One campaign group described the figure as “reasonable or proportionate”.
Denise Coates, joint chief executive and majority shareholder of Bet365, also received at least 50% of the company’s $127m (£100m) profits on top of her $281m salary, company accounts published on Sunday showed.
Her base salary represents an increase of about $10 million compared to last year, even as Bet365 posted pre-tax losses of about $77 million (£60.2 million). The company’s accounts attribute the losses to “a significant increase in costs associated with entering new markets.”
Bet365 did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
The size of Coates’ salary – which makes her the highest-paid woman in Britain and one of the highest-paid CEOs in the world, according to the BBC – has drawn criticism, particularly in light of the UK’s cost of living crisis.
“People deserve to be rewarded for innovation and success, but there is a question about what is reasonable and proportionate,” Luke Hildyard, executive director of the Center on High Wages, said in a statement sent to CNN on Monday.
“No one becomes a billionaire in isolation from the wider community. In this case, wealth depends on the money that comes out of the pockets of gamblers, the efforts of thousands of employees, as well as broader factors such as people with some disposable income, a safe and reliable internet network or all the infrastructure.” Which is involved in organizing sporting events.
Ultimately, Britain’s prosperity depends on how we share the wealth generated by our economy. Pumping hundreds of millions of pounds into the fortunes of billionaires every year is not a good way to maximize living standards, and it overstates the contribution made by the wealthy.
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Bet365 is headquartered in Stoke-on-Trent, England.
Bet365’s latest accounts show the company paid $127m (£100m) to the Denise Coates Foundation, which distributes money to charitable activities across the UK and abroad.
The Sunday Times also estimated the Coates family to be the UK’s second-largest taxpayer in 2023, contributing around $585 million (£460 million).
According to Forbes, which estimates Coates’s fortune at $7 billion, the 56-year-old bought the Bet365.com domain in 2000 and launched the site in 2001.
Today, the company is headquartered in Stoke-on-Trent, employs more than 7,500 people worldwide, and attracts more than 90 million customers each year.
Bet365 Group Limited also owns Stoke City Football Club, which is in the second tier of English football. Last year, the club made pre-tax losses of $15.8m (£12.4m).
The company’s success is a testament to the UK’s interest in gambling.
According to the Gambling Commission, 44% of the country’s adults participated in gambling activity during the last four weeks of the year up to March 2023.
The commission also stated that the British gambling industry generated total revenue of $19.2 billion (£15.1 billion) between April 2022 and March 2023.
However, the gambling industry is one that the government singles out for addiction-related problems.
A 2023 UK government review into gambling-related harms found that 0.5% of the adult population had a gambling problem, 3.8% gambled at at-risk levels, and 7% were negatively affected by the gambling of others.
An economic analysis in the same review found that the annual excess direct fiscal cost to the government related to harmful gambling was equivalent to $525.6 million (£412.9 million).