A Female Billionaire Bookie Bags a $281 Million Pay Packet
The founder-CEO of Bet365, took home $281 million in pay last year, putting her among the world’s best-compensated executives.
(Bloomberg) -- Denise Coates, the founder and chief executive of online bookmaker Bet365 Group Ltd., took home 220 million pounds ($281 million) in pay last year, putting her among the world’s best-compensated executives.
The figure comes from closely held Bet365’s accounts for the year ended March 25 that were published online Tuesday. While the documents didn’t identify Coates by name, they included the award for the company’s highest-paid director.
The figure dwarfs the pay of any public company’s CEO in the U.K. and is a 10 percent increase from her base remuneration of 199.3 million pounds a year earlier. Coates, 51, owns a fortune of 5.8 billion pounds along with her family, according to the Sunday Times newspaper. She holds just over 50 percent of Bet365, according to a July 2015 filing with Companies House.
Her take-home pay is higher than any chief executive on the S&P 500 Index of leading U.S. public companies, according to the Bloomberg Pay Index.
In addition, dividends of 80.7 million pounds were paid to the Stoke-on-Trent, England-based company’s directors including Denise Coates, her brother John Coates and her father Peter Coates, the accounts show.
Representatives for Bet365 and Coates didn’t respond immediately to requests for comment.
Bet365 is the U.K.’s second-largest betting company by sales, behind publicly listed GVC Holdings Plc, another internet player.
Bet365’s operating profit jumped 31 percent to 660 million pounds last year. Since then, the government has moved to increase gambling taxes and force the industry to become more transparent, clouding the outlook for industry profits and hitting the share prices of some of the company’s listed rivals.
Like other U.K. and Ireland based firms including Paddy Power Betfair Plc and William Hill Plc, Bet365 is pushing into the U.S. market following the repeal of a federal ban on sports betting this year.
--With assistance from Tom Metcalf, Ben Stupples and Jenn Zhao.
To contact the reporter on this story: Thomas Seal in London at tseal@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Rebecca Penty at rpenty@bloomberg.net, Thomas Pfeiffer, John Lauerman
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