Billionaire Bet365 boss takes home £150m despite 45% pay cut

Britain’s highest-paid woman, the Bet365 billionaire Denise Coates, has given herself a 45% pay cut but still claimed £150m in salary and dividends last year as profits at the online gambling company soared.

The Stoke-based business reported an increase in turnover from £3.4bn to £3.7bn last year, while also cutting costs and benefiting from a one-off gain on the value of its investments, as equity markets improved.

These three factors catapulted the company to a £626m profit before tax in the year to the end of March 2024, compared with a £60m pre-tax loss the year before.

Coates is known in part for her record-breaking pay packets, which have exceeded £2bn during her time at the helm of Bet365, an online gambling empire that she transformed from a chain of betting shops owned by her father, Peter.

The family came 20th in last year’s Sunday Times Rich List, with a combined net worth of nearly £7.5bn.

The 57-year-old Denise, who has described herself as the “ultimate gambler”, paid herself £95m this year and is also entitled to at least half of the £110m dividend that the company paid, based on her shareholding of more than 50%.

The total £150m payout is significantly down on the previous year, when she awarded herself £270m, and far below the record-breaking £466m she collected in 2020. In 2021, Coates collected £300m.

The company cited reduced executive pay as a factor in its rebound from last year’s losses.

Including the company’s three other directors – two of whom are Denise Coates’s father Peter and her brother John – executive pay was down from £304m to £124m.

The £180m pay cut accounted for approximately a quarter of the difference between Bet365’s £60m deficit in 2023 and the £626m profit it reported for the year to March 2024.

The group also donated £120m to the Denise Coates Foundation, a charity she set up that is controlled by members of the Coates family and their employees. The sum is a fifth up on the £100m given to the foundation last year.

In October, analysis by the Guardian found that the donations may have saved Coates’s online gambling empire more in tax than the foundation has yet given to good causes.

The foundation has previously said it needs to build up large reserves so that it can be self-sustaining in the long term, rather than relying on continued contributions from the company.

Accounts for the wider Bet365 group also included those of Stoke City Football Club, for the final time.

The club was owned by the Bet365 group until last year, when it was demerged from Bet365, with control passed to John Coates.

The club lost £30m during the year, dragging the overall group profit down from £626m to £596m.

Bet365 said it had not set aside any money relating to an investigation into potential breaches of anti money-laundering laws by Austrac, an Australian intelligence agency, because the investigation is ongoing.