Gambling tycoon Denise Coates takes £170m pay cut

$6,000 Welcome Bonus

Play Now

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Denise Coates, Britain’s richest woman, has taken a £170m pay cut as growth stalls at her sprawling bet365 gambling empires.

Ms Coates’ salary fell from £421m to £250m, according to filings today. In addition, she received her share of a £98m dividend alongside her brother John and father Peter.

Ms Coates, the media-shy executive who started bet365 from a mobile cabin two decades ago, remains one of Britain’s most successful entrepreneurs.

Bet365 claims to be the world’s biggest sports betting brand. It is a far cry from the website she set up with her sibling by mortgaging her father’s betting shops to secure a £15m loan from Royal Bank of Scotland in 2001.

“I was convinced early on that gambling would work on the internet,” Denise once said in a rare interview with her local newspaper. 

But after a number of years of rapid growth, filings today reveal that turnover was broadly flat in the year to March 2021 at £2.8bn, despite bet365’s rivals prospering online from a boom in internet gambling during the pandemic.

In her review of the year contained with the annual report, Ms Coates said that growth had been impacted by “a complete cessation of sporting events” as the pandemic hit. Customers had instead moved to other online betting products such as bingo and casino.

“This , allied with the significant migration of customers during the various lockdowns from sports betting to gaming, led to overall revenues remaining broadly flat,” she said.

Ms Coates and bet365 are famed for shunning the limelight, preferring that their advertisements, regularly seen on perimeter boards at football games and on television.

Bet365 has been rocked by claims it makes a large proportion of its revenue in China, where citizens have been arrested for gambling. The operator has made little secret of its business in China, which it says is perfectly legal.

Crucially, it asserts, operating a China-accessible website outside China and remotely supplying its services into China is not against the law.

Questions about where bet365 makes its money will once again be raised as bet365 said it would be “severely prejudicial” to provide a geographical breakdown of where it makes its money.

Bet365 was rejected by the New York state after applying for a gambling licence. The Coates family even vowed never to sell, merge or float bet365 in a long application to officials. New York instead opted to name UK rivals Flutter, the company behind Paddy Power and Betfair, and Entain, whose brands include Ladbrokes and Coral, among the nine licensed operators in the key state.

Despite the fall in Ms Coates’ pay, her family will likely remain the UK’s biggest taxpayer. Known for their support of the Labour party, the Coates’ could cut their tax bill by simply paying themselves more in dividends.

Last year the family paid £615m to HM Revenue and Customs.

Charitable donations rose from £87m to £103m in the year to March 2021.