The boss of gambling firm Bet365 has reportedly earned a pay packet worth £469 million in a single year.
Founder Denise Coates CBE is said to have taken home a £421 million salary in a 12-month period, along with £48 million in dividends.
This means the 53-year-old is thought to have been awarded one of the biggest pay packets in UK corporate history.
She started the online gambling company in the early 2000s in Stoke-on-Trent after spotting the potential of internet betting to revolutionise the industry.
The company, which saw sales fall last year amid the pandemic, told the BBC the arrangements were “appropriate and fair”.
The salary is a significant hike on the basic wage of almost £277 million that she took home in the year ending March 2019, when she was comfortably the highest-paid boss in the country.
That was more than the bosses of every FTSE 100 company combined, according to the High Pay Centre.
While she is one of Britain's wealthiest women, she's a major philanthropist, donating millions through the Denise Coates Foundation.
Ms Coates, Bet365’s joint chief executive, was also the country’s largest taxpayer for the second year running, according to the last annual Sunday Times Tax List.
She and her family, who are worth £7.166 billion, had a tax liability of £573 million last year.
Ms Coates has previously used the company’s annual report to highlight her charity work.
In the year up to the end of March 2019, she donated £85 million from the business’s coffers to the Denise Coates Foundation, up from £75 million the year before.
