The charity named after Bet365 chief executive Denise Coates spent £7.9million less on good causes last year as she enjoyed a pay rise of £7million from the gambling firm.

The Denise Coates Foundation, named after Britain’s richest woman, spent around £11million on charitable activities in 2023, down from about £18.9million in 2022.

It is sitting on reserves of more than £730million in unspent cash after Bet365 and its subsidiaries pumped in another £100million last year – on top of £100million in 2022 – as an endowment.

Denise Coates, who founded Bet365, was handed £271million in pay and dividends last year, according to new company accounts.

The billionaire, 56, received a salary of £221million for the year ending March 2023, up from the £213million she made the year before.

The charity named after gambling tycoon Denise Coates spent £7.9million less on good causes last year as the Bet365 chief executive’s salary rose by £7million

Denise Coates pictured with father Peter (left) and brother John (right) in a business publicity shot back in the early 2000s

The foundation has a reserves policy to maintain the real value of the endowment (including inflation), which was £731.7m as of the publication of the documents, but to ‘otherwise distribute all of the Foundation’s realised income and gains’ with the short to medium term – considered to be one to five years.

Charity documents say this allows the foundation to ‘operate on an enduring basis without being dependent on donations from any particular source’.

All decisions of where money is donated are made by the charity trustees, which include Denise Coates, and her father and Bet365 co-founder Peter Coates, her brother and John Coates.

It is understood that the amount paid in grants to charities last year is lower than the previous year due to lower returns on investments in the financial period and the foundation’s reserves policy.

The foundation’s nearly three-quarters-of-a-billion pound endowment is maintained through investments managed by third party fund managers, Stonehage Fleming – a wealth management firm which has offices in tax havens including Jersey, the Isle of Man, Geneva, Luxembourg and Monaco.

According to documents recently uploaded to Companies House, the Denise Coates Foundation received donations in the financial year to March 2023 of £20million from the Bet365 Group Limited and of £80million from subsidiary Hillside (Media Services) Limited.

Its reserves shot up to £730million last year, a rise from nearly £668million in financial year to March 2022, a rise of more than nine per cent.

Grants were handed out to a variety of causes by the foundation, including three to the New Vic Theatre in London, totalling nearly £2.7million, to support it in its current ‘strengths and successes enabling it to gain a national reputation’ as well as supporting a ‘Middleport Christmas Event’.

Two grants totalling nearly £2million were given to the Douglas Macmillan Hospice to support the integration of children’s hospice The Donna Louise Trust into it, as well as providing funds for 12 months of ‘wrap around’ care such as counselling.

The hospice is based in Stoke-on-Trent, the home of the Coates family, who own Stoke City Football Club.

Nearly £1.6million was donated to the Liberty Academy Trust, which provides education for autistic children, to support an expansion at the Church Lawton School.

The charitable wing of independent Catholic Stonyhurst received £1.1million from the Denise Coates Foundation last year to support money given in bursaries.

Also among the grantees were organisations including the Tate and medical charity Prevent Breast Cancer.

Ms Coates has run Stoke-on-Trent based Bet365 since it was founded in 2000 alongside her father Peter and regularly tops the list of the UK’s best paid chief executives.

She came under fire in 2020 when it was revealed that she paid herself £469million – one of the biggest salaries in UK history.

Her pay out later dropped to £250million in 2021 and then £213million the following year. But it has meant she has earned around £1.2billion in the past four years – making over £1million for every working day.

In 2012, Denise Coates was awarded a CBE for services to the community and business

On top of her £271million salary last year, as the company’s controlling shareholder, Ms Coates was also entitled to at least half of the company’s £100million dividend that was also dished for the year. This landed her a windfall of around £50million. 

And the family, which also owns Stoke City football club, are worth an estimated £8billion.

Her brother John is involved in the Bet365 business and is a major shareholder. But the Coates’s immense wealth and hefty pay cheques have not always proved popular. And some have argued that her latest wage ‘over-values’ the position of chief executives.

Luke Hildyard, executive director of the High Pay Centre, a think tank focused on pay, said: ‘Nobody becomes a multi-billionaire in isolation from wider society. In this case, the wealth depends on money coming out of gamblers’ pockets.’

He added: ‘Pouring hundreds of millions of pounds more on top of billionaire fortunes every year isn’t a good way to maximise living standards and it over-values the contribution that the super-rich have made.’

But the Coates family are some of Britain’s biggest taxpayers having paid an estimated £460million to the Exchequer last year alone.

Bet365 is the largest private sector employer in Stoke and employs around 7,000 out of its headquarters, as well as in Gibraltar.

MailOnline has appcorached Bet365 for comment.

Who is Bet365 boss Denise Coates?

Denise Coates with her father and Bet365 co-founder Peter Coates, who is also the chairman of Stoke City Football Club

Ms Coates has run Stoke-on-Trent based Bet365 since it was founded in 2000 alongside her father Peter and regularly tops the list of the UK’s best paid chief executives.

She bought the domain name on eBay and launched the site in 2001, growing rapidly thanks to prolific advertising fronted by actor Ray Winston. 

As a teenager she learned the bookmakers’ trade working in her father’s Stoke based Provincial Racing outlets, but she could see where the industry was heading.

She convinced him to use them to secure a £15million loan from RBS, which she poured into developing Bet365.

By 2006 it had become so successful she sold those branches to rivals Coral for £40million.

It was working in an office above one of the shops in Tunstall, Stoke, in the late 1990s that she had the idea for Bet365.

The chain was turned round into healthy profit under her stewardship and it was a car park near to one of the branches Bet365 was born.

One of the key decisions she made was to develop bespoke software, rather than using someone else’s for the business.

In the portable cabin in one of the shop car parks between Trentham and Longton the software development team began work.

By December 2000 it had grown so big they moved to a base in Festival Park.

Bet365 is the largest private sector employer in Stoke and employs around 7,000 out of its headquarters, as well as in Gibraltar.

The mother of five children, including four girls adopted from the same family, saw that the future of the industry was online and mortgaged the betting shops to build the Bet365 website.

In 2012, Coates was awarded a CBE for services to the community and business.