Bet365 head Denise Coates sets UK record with £323m pay packet

Denise Coates, the head of gambling group Bet365, was paid £323m last year, setting a new record for a chief executive of a UK company.

Ms Coates, who founded the online betting group with her brother John in a Portakabin in Stoke-on-Trent almost 20 years ago, received a base salary of £277m, 26 per cent more than a year earlier, according to regulatory filings.

She was also awarded a 50 per cent share of a £92.5m dividend, bringing her total package to £323m and cementing her position as one of the world’s highest-paid executives. According to the Forbes list of billionaires, Ms Coates has a net worth of $12.2bn.

Bet365 has consistently outperformed rival listed companies despite rising pressure on the business as regulation tightens in core European markets. It reported record revenues of just under £3bn in the year to March 31 — a 10 per cent increase on the previous year. Pre-tax profit increased 17 per cent to £800m.

Ms Coates’s bumper pay is more than 60 times the £4.7m mean annual pay package of a FTSE 100 chief executive in 2018. The highest-paid boss of a UK-listed company was Jeff Fairburn of Persimmon, who received £38.9m last year, according to a report published in August by the High Pay Centre think-tank.

The Bet365 head was paid more than top US executives such as Henry Kravis and George Roberts, co-founders of KKR, who received $99.5m and $103.9m respectively in 2018. However Stephen Schwarzman of US private equity group Blackstone received a total pay packet of $567m in 2018, although his salary was $69.1m.

Ms Coates, who once worked as a cashier in her family’s betting shops, is one of the top three taxpayers in the UK, according to the Sunday Times.

Sarah Coles, a personal finance analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said Ms Coates was likely to have paid around £125m of her salary in tax, which she could have reduced by taking more in dividends.

Nevertheless her earnings prompted some criticism from gambling campaigners, who said the private company was one of the industry’s most ruthless operators.

“Is it ethical for anyone to earn £1.3m a day?” said Brian Chappell, founder of the consumer rights group Justice For Punters. “When you combine that with coming from an industry where if [gamblers] are any good [they] will get shut down or if [they] are a heavy loser there is a good chance [they] will get made a VIP.”

Adam Bradford, director of the Safer Online Gambling Group, called on Ms Coates to donate 10 per cent of her salary to help problem gamblers.

Ms Coates, who lives in Cheshire and is known to shun attention, said in the filings that Bet365 had donated £85m to her charitable foundation in the period. The charity sponsors numerous projects around Stoke-on-Trent. The Coates family also own Stoke City football club, which was relegated from the Premier League last year.

Rival industry executives have praised Bet365. Peter Jackson, chief executive of PaddyPowerBetfair owner, Flutter, called it “an impressive operator”, while another CEO said that if it were not a gambling company, Bet365 would be heralded as “a massive success”.

Bet365 said that both the World Cup football and the 53-week reporting period had a positive impact on its latest results.

But heightened regulation in the UK, where it makes up about a fifth of its business, meant that growth had slowed.

In the previous year, to the end of March 2018, the company increased revenues at a faster rate of 25 per cent.

Paul Leyland, an analyst at Regulus Partners, said that despite record sales, the company had suffered a “notable slowdown” in growth. “It’s a different magnitude of growth to what we’re used to seeing from Bet365. And that’s not an operational thing, it’s a regulatory thing,” he said.

The industry research firm Gambling Compliance said UK revenues at Bet365 had declined 24 per cent in the 2018 calendar year because of “a vigorous approach towards compliance with new regulations”.

However, a source familiar with Bet365’s activities said its sales were boosted by its offering in as yet unregulated markets, particularly in Asia.

Regulatory filings by Bet365 published the pay details of its highest-paid director, which multiple sources close to the business said was Ms Coates.

The Coates family declined to comment.