Millionaires on a gamble. A scandal in the UK gambling industry
Another scandal in the UK gambling industry. According to information CNN, the head of the gambling company BET365 Denise Coates has earned $281 million in salary over the past year. In addition to that, she also received $127 million in dividends.
Ref: Denise Coates is the richest and most powerful woman in the betting industry. Denise is the founder and CEO of Bet365. This company owns Stoke City FC and the arena where the team plays is named in its honor. Denise’s father, Peter Coates, is the current chairman of the club, who has held this position since 2006.
And everything would be fine, but the company headed by Ms. Coates and where she wrote out such a salary, officially stated in a tax return that the company ended 2023 with a loss of $ 77 million, and therefore will not pay taxes to the state budget.
The business of this company, as the article points out, is not production or any important public services, but betting and gambling. Such a salary, against the background of official losses and non-payment of taxes on the money of low-income people, who are the bulk of those who lose their money in gambling, caused shock and massive criticism in the UK and abroad.
Although Denise Coates doesn’t like publicity, she makes headlines almost every year in the leading English publications. It’s all because of her cosmic official salary, which is 2000 times higher than the salary of the British Prime Minister. According to the influential business publication Bloomberg, Denise received $648 million (salary + dividends) in 2020. By the way, a year ago, she received half as much. That is, we can say that the bookmaker has fully recovered from last year’s problems associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the British Gambling Commission, 44% of Britons regularly gamble. Already 7% of the population of this country have faced significant negative consequences of their gambling addiction, almost 4% of the population are in the high-risk group, and half a percent of the adult population has serious personal problems due to gambling.
And those who talk about state budget revenues from gambling or casinos, as the official British Gambling Commission has found, are simply mistaken or misleading. Only individuals such as Denise Coates have income. For the country, the annual excessive direct financial costs of the government due to harmful gambling are equivalent to 525.6 million US dollars.
That is why ludomania and the loss of the last money on bets or in casinos on the one hand and the excessive profits of owners of gambling salons and online games on the other caused shock and negative reaction in the UK, journalists conclude.
