The head of the gambling giant bet365 Denise Coates has been announced on the Sunday Times Tax List as the largest taxpayer in the UK in 2021.
According to reports, the Coates family paid a total of £481.7 million, which put them on top of the annual ranking of the biggest tax payments in the country for the third consecutive year. Although the tax payment of the family owning one of the largest gambling empires on a global scale was down from the £573 million tax they paid in 2020, it was still almost £200 million more than the amount paid by the second one in the taxpayer ranking, hedge fund manager Chris Rokos, who paid £300 million to the exchequer.
The overall tax paid by the 50 biggest taxpayers in the country increased by £510 million from £3.2 billion in 2020 to £3.7 billion in 2021. The minimum amount of tax paid that one needed to get to the top 50 increased by 16% from the previous year to £15.2 million.
The compiler of the list, Robert Watts, described the 2021 Tax List as stronger than the one published for the previous year, which would actually be good news for the chancellor. He also confirmed that the year-on-year increase in the overall amount paid in taxes by the largest taxpayers in the UK exceeded £500 million.
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The London-based progressive think tank called Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), however, said that the Sunday Times Tax List for providing an insight into the “broken tax system: of the UK, which, according to the IPPR, allows the richest people in the nation to pay little to no tax.
The 54-year-old Denise Coates, whose overall payment for 2021 amounted to £421 million, has managed to build a fortune of about £8.4 billion from her gambling empire, making her the 17th richest person in the UK. She has received payments of almost £1.3 billion since 2016.
The gambling giant run by the Coates family – bet365 – has developed in a way that left the appearance of a regular high-street bookmaker way behind, as it now offers a great variety of gambling services, including online casino gambling, bingo, poker, sports betting, esports, etc. However, the easy accessibility and the large variety of services offered by gambling apps have resulted in increased criticism for the gambling company.
According to figures provided by the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC), even before the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, there were about 400,000 gambling addicts in the UK, with about 55,000 of these people being individuals aged from 11 to 16. Now, new reports have shown that the lengthy social isolation due to the coronavirus lockdowns has resulted in increasing financial worries and other mental anxieties, and they, in their turn, led to a massive increase in online gambling participation rates.
In other words, the social cost of gambling has risen not only for gamblers themselves, but also for their families, friends and colleagues.
These are the time when large-scale gambling companies operated by top executives, such as Denise Coates, have generated billions on the backs of people who find it hard to control their gambling habits. For years, anti-gambling campaigners have criticised them for that, saying that no matter what tax payments are made by these companies and their bosses, money cannot compensate for the serious lack of concern for local players who have been suffering from the detrimental impact of gambling on their lives.
- Author
Daniel Williams
