This article is more than 9 months old

This article is more than 9 months old

Denise Coates, the multibillionaire founder of the gambling company Bet365, paid herself £323m last year.

The sum is the highest amount paid to the chief executive of a British company and breaks the previous record of £265m set by Coates a year earlier.

Her pay equates to £1.3m for every working day last year. It is 9,500 times the average UK salary and more than 2,000 times the amount paid to the prime minister, Boris Johnson.

Coates, 52, was paid a base salary of £276,585,000 in the year to March 2018, accounts filed at Companies House revealed on Wednesday. On top of this, she collected dividend payments of about £45m from her shareholding of more than 50% in the Stoke-on-Trent-based company.

In the past three years, Coates has collected a total of £817m. Over the same period, the average amount earned by the people of Stoke was £66,500. Her pay works out at 18,500 times that of the average woman in the city.

Coates was immediately accused of seeking to delay the public release of details of her pay until after the general election. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, had promised to “go after” the UK’s wealthy elite and crack down on excessive corporate pay.

Luke Hildyard, who campaigns against excessive executive remuneration at the High Pay Centre, said: “This looks like cynical timing, sneaked out straight after a general election campaign where excess wealth, taxes on the rich and the vast gap between those at the top and everybody else have been key issues.

“It’s important that wealth and how it’s created and shared are properly debated. But the publication of these figures seems designed to avoid scrutiny, suggesting that even Bet365 recognises that, while business success should be rewarded, such a colossal payout goes far beyond what is fair or proportionate.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bet365 sponsors Stoke City’s stadium and is the largest private-sector employer in the city. Photograph: Mick Walker/CameraSport/Getty Images

The accounts had been expected to be filed on or around 20 November and no reason was given for the delay. A spokesman for Coates and Bet365 did not respond to requests for comment.

Bet365 sent a selected version of its accounts to gambling industry trade publications on Monday and Tuesday and warned them not to pass the documents on to the Guardian or other national newspapers. The websites did not mention her bumper payday.

The company paid its top directors and managers, who include Coates’ brother and father, a total of £428m.

Coates is ranked as the UK’s 19th-richest person with an estimated fortune of £6.9bn.

She keeps herself out of the public eye and rarely gives media interviews. Coates and the rest of her family – including her brother John, the co-chief executive; her husband, Richard Smith, a Stoke City director; and her father, who chairs Stoke City – control 93% of Bet365.

After graduating with a first-class degree in econometrics – the application of statistical methods to economic data – from Sheffield University, Coates expanded the family’s Provincial Racing chain to nearly 50 betting shops.

As the millennium approached, she decided the future of betting was online and bought the Bet365.com domain on eBay for $25,000 (£19,000), a move that helped catapult her and her family up the UK wealth league.

Coates was awarded a CBE in 2012 for services to the community and business, and has become known as the “patron of the Potteries” for her decision to continue to base Bet365 in Stoke, where it is the largest private-sector employer.

“We mortgaged the betting shops and put it all into online,” she said at the time. “We knew the industry required big start-up costs but we gambled everything on it.”

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It was revealed last year that Coates had spent £5.5m buying up hundreds of acres of farmland surrounding her home, purchasing 12 separate plots of land since 2014.

She was reported to have been spending £90m building a large glass home with a 7,000 sq metre (75,000 sq ft) lake, a boat house, tennis court, stables and walled garden.

Bet365 made a £85m donation to the Denise Coates Foundation, which mostly funds medical and education charities. The charity has not made any donations to gambling or addiction charities.