For the third straight year, the highest-paid CEO in the United Kingdom is billionaire Denise Coates, founder, joint CEO and majority shareholder of British online gambling company Bet365 Group Ltd (or Bet365). She is married to Richard Smith.
Coates paid herself a record-breaking $422 million (£323 million) total annual salary for 2019. Her stupendous total salary, which is more than 9,000 times the UK's average salary of $38,500 (£29,400), consists of a $288 million (£220 million) base salary and half the company's $121 million (£92.5 million) total dividends arising from her 50.1% stake in the business.
Coates earned $1.7 million (£1.3 million) per working day of the year for jointly running the company she founded in 2000 in a portakabin at Stoke-on-Trent. This amount is a record paycheck for a director of any UK firm. She is also Bet365′s highest-paid director. Forbes estimates Coates' wealth at some $12.2 billion.
Coates, a mother of five (four adopted), became the highest paid UK executive in 2017, awarding herself a salary of $284 million (£217 million). She repeated as highest paid CEO in 2018 by paying herself $347 million (£265 million) as Bet365 reported a 31% spike in profits to $863 million (£660 million).
Coates was widely criticized by British and other charity groups for paying herself such obscenely large salaries. She has brushed aside these criticisms.
"It cannot be right that the CEO of a betting company is paid 22 times more than the whole industry 'donates' to treatment," said Mike Dixon, CEO of British charity group Addaction, in 2017.
The following year, after Coates again increased her already massive salary, Luke Hildyard of the High Pay Centre said, "Obviously, people who build successful companies need to be rewarded for their hard work, but this is an obscene amount of money for someone who is already a billionaire. It's weird to think that someone so rich would want to get their hands on even more, rather than put it to a more useful purpose."
In January 2019, Bet365 was ranked second on The Sunday Times list of the UK's top taxpayers. The Coates family -- Denise, brother John (Bet365 Joint CEO) and father Peter (Bet365 chairman) -- paid a total tax of $204 million (£156 million), of which $130 million (£99 million) was paid by Denise alone.
Bet365 has grown into one of the world's largest online gambling companies, with $3.9 billion in revenues for its 2019 business year and $1.0 billion (£767 million) in operating revenues. It employs more than 4,600 people worldwide.
