Boss of gambling company Bet365 was paid £221m during its last financial year, despite the company reporting a loss.
Just a few days after High Pay Day – the 3rd working day of the year when FTSE 100 CEOs have already worked enough to get paid what a typical UK worker is paid in a year – the pay package of Britain’s highest paid CEO was announced.
Denise Coates, the CEO of gambling company Bet 365 was paid more than £270 million in the last financial year – a 7 million pounds increase. That’s a figure over 70 times greater than a typical FTSE 100 CEO and over 8,000 times greater than the median UK worker. This is despite the firm making a £60m loss.
High Pay Centre’s response was covered by a range of national media outlets including BBC News, the Guardian and the I. Our view is that it is extremely inefficient for such a huge amount of income to accrue to one individual when so many people in Britain are struggling.
Nobody becomes a multimillionaire in isolation from wider society. In this case, the wealth depends on money coming out of gamblers’ pockets, the efforts of thousands of staff, plus wider factors like people having some disposable income, a secure and reliable internet network or all the infrastructure that goes into staging sports events. Furthermore, a payment this size is obviously vastly more than necessary to encourage or reward success.
There really is no moral or economic justification for such extreme payouts and the inequality and division that they create.