Monday, November 13, 2017

Gambling with Lives

Founder of online bookmaker becomes UK’s highest paid boss as concern rises about number of lives ruined by gambling addiction.

Denise Coates of gambling firm Bet365, paid herself £217m last year as her company made a £525m profit from a record £47bn of bets.

Coates’s £199,305,000 pay this year is more than 1,300 times that of the prime minister and more than double the wage bill of Stoke City, the Premier League club owned by Bet365. On top of the £199m, Coates collected £18m in dividend payments. Coates and her family were listed as the 22nd richest in Britain with a £5bn fortune – more than Sir Richard Branson with £4.9bn. Coates, who keeps out of the public eye, owns just over 50% of the company. Together with the rest of her family – including brother, John, a co-CEO; husband Richard Smith, a Stoke City director, and father Peter, the chairman of Stoke City – the Coateses own 93% of Bet365. Coates, who was awarded a CBE for services to the community and business.

Tracey Crouch, a minister at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, has warned that as many as 600,000 Britons are “problem gambling”. 

The Gambling Commission, the industry regulator, has said 2 million people in the UK are either problem gamblers or at risk of addiction.

Mike Dixon, the chief executive of the charity Addaction, said: “It cannot be right that the CEO of a betting company is paid 22 times more than the whole industry ‘donates’ to treatment. The gambling industry is paying nowhere near enough for the treatment of gambling addicts. It means that there are a lot of people are not getting any help at all. It seems indefensible for the industry to be giving so little, when it is making so much money.”

A spokesman for campaign group Fairer Gambling said: “As losses from Britain’s gamblers continue to spiral out of control, so has executive pay. The entire gambling industry donated just £8m to research, education, and treatment last year. If these companies can afford to pay their executives millions of pounds a year, there is no excuse for such chronically underfunded treatment services.”

Stefan Stern, director of the High Pay Centre thinktank, said Coates’ pay was “just a ridiculously massive sum of money”, adding: “When a business is making its money in a way that causes a great deal of concern about its level of social responsibility it is even more unacceptable to see someone extracting this amount of wealth while so many people are left as victims in the wake of its business operations.

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