The Bet365 boss Denise Coates was paid more than £260m in salary and dividends in the year to March 2022, underlining her place as one of the world’s highest-paid executives.
The best-paid Bet365 director, thought to be Coates, received remuneration of £213m for the year, about 15% lower than the £250m awarded in the previous year, according to the company accounts published on Friday.
As the company’s controlling shareholder she is also entitled to at least 50% of the £100m dividend for the year.
Coates’s latest package was a drop of about £35m compared with the previous year as the gambling company spent heavily on expansion.
Her extraordinary pay package regularly ranks among the biggest in Britain and beyond, and the latest is likely to put her among the very highest earners at a time when many in the UK are struggling with the rising cost of living.
Coates built Bet365 into one of the biggest online gambling companies from her father Peter’s Stoke-on-Trent bookmaking business. It has propelled her, her father and her brother, John, into the ranks of the UK’s richest people, with a fortune jointly worth £8.6bn in May 2022, according to the Sunday Times Rich List.
Coates has reaped more than £1bn in salary and dividends from Bet365 within the last three years. She received almost £300m in the year to March 2021, the first year of coronavirus pandemic lockdowns. In the previous year she received £421m in salary, thought to be the record for a UK chief executive, plus about £45m in dividends.
In the latest financial year, Bet365’s profits dropped significantly. It made a profit before tax of £49.8m for the year (after a £26.2m loss from its ownership of Stoke City Football Club). That was significantly less than the £469m profit reported in the previous year.
Gambling revenues increased by 2% during the year to £2.85bn. Sports betting revenues fell by 2% but its online games revenues jumped by 25% during the year to make up the lost ground.
The drop in profits was largely driven by £320m in extra “administration expenses” that included advertising in new markets and spending on extra computers for expansion. It reported launches in Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, the Netherlands, and in Colorado and Ontario in North America.
Bet365’s staff numbers rose to almost 6,100, up from 5,400 the year before.
The company was approached for comment.