Wtf

JasonC

Well-known member
Or helped out some of those whose lives have been ruined by gambling addiction?
Maybe the betting firms could be the next target for a windfall tax?
 

Steve Clark

Well-known member
You can download their accounts from companies house. In the last couple of years they have stopped reporting the 'Total amount wagered'. This was last reported in 2019 (see page 12 if you're interested).

For the year March 2018-March 2019 the total amount wagered on Bet365 was £64,486,235,000.00.

64 billion pounds.

That's about £1000 each for everyone in the UK.

I've never gambled a penny with them, as I'm sure the majority of people haven't. A lot of people must be gambling a scary amount of money to make up that number.

Edit : I was slightly curious having been involved with a company tendering to build Denise Coates' house. A £90m Foster designed palace in Cheshire. They had built the Olympic stadium & new American embassy but withdrew the tender for the house on grounds of risk with the technical complexity of it.
 
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Chocolate fireguard

Active member
Yes it does seem very unfair.
And there is a case for giving some of the money to charities that help gambling addicts. And others.
But I was once told that every time money changes hands it (all) pays somebody's wages. Since then, on and off, I have tried to think of a case where that isn't true, and I haven't been able to.
Taking the house as an example, if a house costs £90m then that's £90m of wages divided up between everybody involved in the process, from the architect to the building site labourers.
Presumably Ms Coates isn't going to clean the place or do the gardening herself?
 

Loki

Active member
You can download their accounts from companies house. In the last couple of years they have stopped reporting the 'Total amount wagered'. This was last reported in 2019 (see page 12 if you're interested).

For the year March 2018-March 2019 the total amount wagered on Bet365 was £64,486,235,000.00.

64 billion pounds.

That's about £1000 each for everyone in the UK.

I've never gambled a penny with them, as I'm sure the majority of people haven't. A lot of people must be gambling a scary amount of money to make up that number.

Edit : I was slightly curious having been involved with a company tendering to build Denise Coates' house. A £90m Foster designed palace in Cheshire. They had built the Olympic stadium & new American embassy but withdrew the tender for the house on grounds of risk with the technical complexity of it.
Yup it’s being built about 15 mins or so walk from the house I grew up in. Gargantuan development.
 

Loki

Active member
Yes it does seem very unfair.
And there is a case for giving some of the money to charities that help gambling addicts. And others.
But I was once told that every time money changes hands it (all) pays somebody's wages. Since then, on and off, I have tried to think of a case where that isn't true, and I haven't been able to.
Taking the house as an example, if a house costs £90m then that's £90m of wages divided up between everybody involved in the process, from the architect to the building site labourers.
Presumably Ms Coates isn't going to clean the place or do the gardening herself?
I can see that but I don’t see anyone being able to blow £240mil a year. Building a £90m house on 4 months wages. How many people in the world can do that?
 

pwhole

Well-known member
She makes some coke barons' income look puny, and yet, like Pablo Escobar, she also gives a lot of money to charridy, and, like Mike Smash, doesn't like to talk about it. I think that's called guilt-washing. She's as grim as any major drug-dealer, and arguably worse, as at least you get high when you spend your money with them, rather than just deflated. Especially betting on sport - I can't think of anything more depressing than betting on the same thing as last week, but this time, more than any other time....

I agree, there is a point, and it's not far into a couple of million, that you never need worry for money again as an adult. 260 million a year is just evil. My worry about the rich people filtering their cash downwards argument is that they usually don't - for all the window cleaners and butlers they employ, the majority is just sat in a safe account, miles from anywhere - and doing absolutely nothing. Spending it all on absolute shite, like that lunatic lottery winner guy with the quad bikes is far better, as then we do get the money back into the system, and relatively quickly. Except, perhaps, for all the money he spent on coke, which probably went to the family of Pablo Escobar. C'est la vie.
 

petecaves

New member
Just think, if we taxed that properly (we won't because most of it will be dividends, and the rest carefully shunted), and did the same for every similar amount earned we could pay people a reasonable wage. And yet "there's no money..."
 

Fjell

Well-known member
Any money sat in an account has to be used for something to generate interest. The only real power a very rich person has is to dictate who gets their money, rather than (say) a government. They can’t personally consume very much that is denied others. All services involve wages.

Often the discussion comes down to where it gets spent. Russian kleptocrats take money out of Russia and spend it elsewhere. That is very bad for other Russians, but good for people who provide services to Russian kleptocrats (London springs to mind). In my view it is much worse for ordinary Russians than it is better for Londoners, so it should stop. Not always a popular view in London. Bit like how we import huge numbers of doctors from countries in a far worse situation than the UK - for many years this was deemed a wild success, I begged to differ.
 

Chocolate fireguard

Active member
Odd ideas in some of the above posts.
Not least that a bank can afford to take money and not do anything with it.
They do have to pay their people, pay rent, pay interest.

Is there some envy here?
 

Steve Clark

Well-known member
The sad thing about all this is that the money being spent on gambling sites has already been taxed. In most cases, it's the bit left of their hard earned money. When they inevitably lose, it goes to the baron and gets kept as a number on a bank's ledger. If it wasn't so easy to gamble maybe folks would get addicted to something else. Like paying for decent food, fun activities & bikes for their kids. Money that is actually spent in the UK, generating VAT. Making and selling stuff that employs people in good jobs and improves people's lives.

Those who gamble whilst also paying high interest rates on credit card debt end up poor or broke, even if they have good jobs.

Just ban it.

The original Bet365 software engineers built a software solution that handles huge amounts of data and billions of transactions whilst working in a portacabin in a car park in Stoke. It clearly works. Imagine what a thousand of them could achieve in efficiency if you let them loose on an education, local government or nhs software project.
 

mikem

Well-known member
"Bet365 which was established in 2001 is today the world’s leading online bookmaker. The company is based out of the United Kingdom and they cater to more than 200 different countries." - which is pretty much all of them, so nearer £10 per person, although many of them are too young or too poor (or sensible), but it's still reckoned that 4 billion people bet each year, or £20 each.

Interestingly total international online gambling is reckoned to be less than their wagers, so they must have other income streams.
 
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mikem

Well-known member
Actually ignore last paragraph above, in 2018 worldwide online revenue was $300 billion ($40 pp) & UK £5 billion (£80 pp). [The £20 above was just with bet365]:

Estimates on the total number of countries vary from 196 to 237!

& From Wikipedia: "In the summer of 2019, the largest UK bookmakers and online casino operators William Hill, GVC Holdings, Flutter Entertainment, Stars Group and Bet365 entered into an agreement to transfer funds to combat gambling addiction. They agreed to increase the amount from 0.1% to 1% of gross income in the next five years."
 
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Steve Clark

Well-known member
I’m no expert on this, but I don’t think revenue and total amount wagered are the same thing.

For bet365 alone, total wagered is of the order 50-100bn, revenue/turnover (total wagered-payouts) is about 3bn and gross yield (profit after admin expenses and salaries) in the 100m range.

Your £20 per person quoted above is the amount lost on average by half the worlds population. The amount wagered per person will be a least an order of magnitude larger.

The most worrying statistic in your link above is that 32% of the U.K. population gamble weekly.

Edit : on the positive side, you are correct that a lot of bet365 is international. They seem to operate and pay tax on this revenue entirely in the U.K. They are bringing money into the U.K. from emerging markets. The boss is taking the majority of her earnings as properly taxed salary and is buying and building things in the U.K. with it. If the other online gambling firms bosses aren’t taking such large salaries then you do wonder where that money is going.
 
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Flotsam

Active member
Like most successful business people she didn't start from ground zero. Her father ran gambling businesses and she worked for her father and the family were already wealthy. I don't think anyone without that background could have succeeded. She was intelligent and did extremely well.

However I hate gambling and don't view the gambling industry as productive and worthwhile. If I could do it I'd shut the whole industry down.
 

mikem

Well-known member
Yes, i know the figures aren't directly comparable & a lot of those people only bet once a year (e.g. the derby), plus many only do it offline still, but they give ball park figures.

She actually started by borrowing £15 million from the bank against her father's betting shops to set it up, so would have bankrupted them all if it failed. But ended up selling the shops off to Coral for £40 million & keeping the bigger business - so she's a gambler herself! & most of her pay is probably invested in other companies, so is keeping others in jobs too (but making her more money...)
 

Flotsam

Active member
Yes, i know the figures aren't directly comparable & a lot of those people only bet once a year (e.g. the derby), plus many only do it offline still, but they give ball park figures.

She actually started by borrowing £15 million from the bank against her father's betting shops to set it up, so would have bankrupted them all if it failed. But ended up selling the shops off to Coral for £40 million & keeping the bigger business - so she's a gambler herself! & most of her pay is probably invested in other companies, so is keeping others in jobs too (but making her more money...)
I can't fault her intelligence and enterprise but wish it was directed into something worthwhile.
I view gambling as a vampire industry sucking the lifeblood out of vulnerable people and poor communities.
 

pwhole

Well-known member
Indeed. But if she was selling smack she'd be viewed as a total scumbag, and I really struggle to see any material difference at the consumer end, except they'd probably have a better time on smack.

I don't usually watch football, but was at my mate's tonight and he had Match of the Day on, and it is literally dripping with betting ads everywhere - on all the stand displays, all the players' shirts, it's ridiculous. It's a self-sustaining monster, and they're all pretending like it's not happening. The presenters themselves are getting paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to talk the same old bullshit every week, despite knowing they keep this thing going by doing it. Now Jeff Stelling, that creep from Sky Sport, is doing 'therapy' ads for addicted gamblers telling them how to 'take a break', even though he's spent the last five years telling them to bet constantly on everything, the evil c*nt. Here's one before his miraculous conversion:

 
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