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Bet365 boss Denise Coates maintained her position as one of the UK’s top-paid executives last year after taking home more than £150m – despite taking a paycut of around 45 per cent for the year.
Freshly filed Companies House accounts for the Stoke-based business showed that their profits surged, but the salary of its highest paid director, understood to be Ms Coates, was £94.7m for the year to March 2024.
It represented a sharp decline from the £220m she received in the previous year, which resulted in significant criticism from groups including the High Pay Centre.
The accounts also showed that the business paid a £110m dividend to shareholders for the year. It is understood that Ms Coates would be eligible for around £64m due to her holding in the company.
Ms Coates, whose father and brother are the joint chairmen of Stoke City Football Club, has helped expand the family bookmakers into a multibillion-pound enterprise over the last two decades, having reportedly started the firm with a website set up from a small portable building in a carpark.
The BBC report the combined Coates family have a net worth of around £7.5bn, placing them in 20th position in last year’s Sunday Times Rich List.
Bet365’s latest accounts showed that the company recorded a turnover of £3.72bn for the year, up from £3.41bn a year earlier.
It also swung to a £596.3m pre-tax profit for the year, from a £72.6m loss a year earlier. In April last year the company was also fined £582,120 over failures linked to protections against money laundering and protecting vulnerable customers.
During the course of the year the company’s headcount increased 20 per cent, from 7,567 to 9,145.
A statement from the company on their growth this year read:
“The group has continued to invest in its trading platform capability and markets, increasing our global in-play and pre-match market offerings still further. The visual sports product has been improved, with enhancements to soccer and the addition of more sports, including American football and baseball.
“Our match live offering also continued to expand with the addition of basketball, further enhancing customers’ real time sports information and in-play options and experience.”
Additional reporting by Karl Matchett
