Bet365 chief Denise Coates’s salary rises to £221mn

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Bet365 chief Denise Coates earned close to £300mn last year in pay and dividends from the UK-based gambling group, confirming her position as one of the world’s best-paid executives.

Coates was paid about £221mn in the year ending March 2023, according to accounts filed at Companies House on Monday, an increase on her salary of £213mn last year. She also took at least half of the £100mn the company paid out in dividends, given her stake as the founder of Bet365.

This year’s payout comes despite the group falling to a pre-tax loss of £72.6mn, from a profit of close to £50mn in 2022, as it expanded in regions such as North America.

The group is also the majority owner of Stoke City Football Club, which reported an annual loss of £12.4mn, albeit an improvement on the £26.3mn loss the year before.

Coates is ranked as one of the wealthiest businesspeople in the UK, having earned more than £1bn in pay and dividends over the past few years.

Her pay at the family-owned company easily eclipses the levels offered by listed FTSE 100 groups, where Pascal Soriot, boss of pharma group AstraZeneca, was the highest paid executive in 2022 with annual earnings of about £15mn.

Coates also narrowly trumps the best-paid executives in the US S&P 500 where Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman earned $253mn last year and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet was paid $226mn in total remuneration.

Coates, who founded the company in Stoke-on-Trent more than two decades ago and kept the business in the area, is also one of the UK’s highest taxpayers. Bet365 also donated £100mn to the Denise Coates Foundation, a registered charity.

Coates’s salary peaked at £421mn in 2020, but dropped to £250mn in 2021 and then to £213mn in 2022. This means that she has earned £1.1bn through her annual salary alone in just four years. The group, which is more than 50 per cent owned by Coates, also paid out £100mn in dividends in 2023 and 2022, £97.5mn in 2021 and £95mn in 2020.

On Monday, the group said that revenues rose to £3.4bn in the year to March 2023, from £2.9bn the year before, with the majority from sports betting. The increase reflected the expansion into new markets, with a launch of operations in the US and Canada in 2022, but this also led to a “significant increase in costs”, the group said.