Flutter Entertainment Hands Out £14 Million To Staff

Flutter Entertainment the operator of brands such as Paddy Power, Sky Bet and Betfair have announced it is to hand out £1,000 bonus to all its 14,000 staff as a thank you for helping the company during the last year during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Peter Jackson, chief executive of Flutter Entertainment talking to the Telegraph newspaper, said the bonus came in company shares because “maybe we are all bookmakers at heart [and] there is a degree of risk-taking”.

At the same time Mr Jackson said that if the current UK government review into gambling were to ban sports betting advertising it would face a “cash crisis” at the present time for those sports and even more so to horseracing.

But he said that sports would survive IF the government gave enough time in the transition period and not ban it immediately.

“If gambling is not allowed to continue its association with sports, because that’s what the Government decides, I think there would need to be a good transition period. I don’t think that the switch would be an easy one because the gambling industry is a source of revenue for the sector … A lot of these sports are saying: ‘Now’s a really difficult time for us because we’ve lost all gate receipts … Please don’t make life harder for us.’

“But as we’ve all shown over the last 12 months, people are very adaptable and … sports could get there with enough notice.”