Bet365 boss Denise Coates pays herself record £323m

The female founder and boss of gambling operator Bet365 paid herself a record £323m last year - £58m more than she earned the year before.

Denise Coates was paid a salary of £276.6m in the year to March 2018, accounts at Companies House showed. She also collected dividend payments of £45m from her ownership of more than half the Stoke-based company.

The billionaire's earnings are the highest ever paid to the boss of a UK company, smashing her own record from the year before, according to the Guardian, which broke the story.

The giant payday is 9,500 times the average UK salary and takes Coates's earnings in the past three years to £817m, the Guardian said. Bet365's operating profit for the year to March 2018 rose 15% to £758m as revenue increased 7% to £3.1bn.

Coates, 52, worked as a cashier marking up results in betting shops owned by her father before taking the helm and turning the privately-owned business into one of the world’s biggest gambling groups.

She applied her first-class degree in econometrics from Sheffield University to expand the family’s chain of bookies to nearly 50 shops. As the internet took off in the late 1990s she saw that the future of betting was online and bought the Bet365.com domain on eBay for $25,000 (£19,000).

Bet365's accounts showed the company donated £85m to the Denise Coates Foundation charity, up from £75m a year before. The charity makes grants in a wide range of areas including education, the arts and medical research. The company owns Stoke City FC, which lost £8.7m.