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The brother duo behind UK betting shop chain Betfred have been named the UK’s biggest taxpayers for the first time.
Brothers Fred and Peter Done, founders of the bookmaker chain Betfred, have been named to the top spot in The Sunday Times Tax List.
But he is right to say that the UK has a billionaire problem.
So many of them left. We need them to stay, invest, create jobs – and pay taxes.
The Sunday Times today named the top 100 taxpayers. https://t.co/BYxziCcXCR https://t.co/QLF357Sc2A pic.twitter.com/bzrtArOXA2
— Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) February 1, 2026
In total, the 100 individuals and families included in the list paid £5.758 billion ($7.88 billion) in UK tax, a 15.5% increase from last year. The Betfred brothers are in the top spot with a clearance of £68.7 million ($94 million).
The duo started the betting world with a winning bet for England to win the 1966 World Cup. They used these winnings to open the first Betfred shop, with over 1,300 shops now open in the UK by 2025.
However, Fred is Finished warned last year that a tax increase would see locations forced to close, saying the tax increase is the “biggest threat” to the industry in its lifetime. This warning is followed by a sharp increase in UK betting taxas Done feared.
The next entry on the Sunday Times list is Alex Gerco, a London-based Moscow-born businessman who paid £331.4 million ($453.6 million) in tax last year.
Betfred doesn’t just pay high taxes
As well as the brothers’ personal heavy tax bill, the company itself was slapped with a huge bill at the end of 2025, after Betfred was found to have “ineffectively identified and managed money laundering risks” related to their gaming machines and failed to “identify spending and associated financial indicators of gambling harm for customers using the gaming machines in B3.”
It fined the company £825,000 ($1.1 million).
Featured image: Wikimedia Commonslicensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
The post The Betfred brothers have been named the UK’s biggest taxpayers for the first time first appeared in ReadWrite.
