Bonne Terre casinos

Bonne Terre Limited Information

Who are Bonne Terre Limited?

We could answer that question with a single sentence if we felt like it. Bonne Terre Limited is Sky Betting and Gaming trading under another name. “Bonne Terre,” as the French speakers among you will already have realised, is French for “Good Ground.” The ground is, of course, the opposite of the sky, so presumably somebody at Sky thought they were funny when they came up with the name. You won’t see the Bonne Terre name used anywhere prominent on any of the operator’s casinos – it goes almost exclusively by the name “Sky Betting & Gaming,” and the Bonne Terre name is used purely for licensing purposes.

As we’ve told you that Bonne Terre Limited is Sky Betting and Gaming, you should already have a good idea of which iGaming sites this company operates. The long and short of it is that if you play at any of the Sky-branded casinos and betting sites, from Sky Bet to Sky Vegas, you’re playing at a Bonne Terre Limited site. There’s far more to the company’s story than that, though, so let’s take a closer look.

An overview of Bonne Terre Limited

Unusually for such a large casino network company, Bonne Terre Limited is based in the UK. To be more specific, it’s based in Leeds. While plenty of big-name casino operators up sticks and move their headquarters to Gibraltar or Malta for tax purposes as soon as they start making money, Bonne Terre Limited hasn’t followed suit. The fact that it’s still a UK-based company means that it’s listed at Companies House, and so we’re able to confirm that the business was incorporated in July 2002. That makes it a twenty-plus-year veteran of the UK iGaming scene – and there aren’t too many of those around.

Another benefit of the company being UK-based and reporting to UK authorities is that we can see how much money it’s making. Given the enormously high profile of the Bonne Terre Limited iGaming sites, you’d expect the business to be making healthy profits – and it is. The most recent figures available as of the time of writing are for the year ending December 31st 2021, and confirm that Bonne Terre Limited made a profit of £108.9m after taxation. Revenue for the year was £423.6m. Those are the basic facts and figures – now let’s look at the company’s history.

The founding of Bonne Terre Limited

We’ve already covered the fact that Bonne Terre Limited was founded in July 2002. The world of iGaming looked very different back then – it was still a relatively new idea, and the companies that offered it tended to be seen as specialists. One such company was the Sports Internet Group, which began offering basic gambling services online in the late 1990s. In July 2000, the Sports Internet Group attracted the attention of broadcasting giant BSkyB, which spotted the potential of the sites operated by the company, and so it acquired both the company and the sites. At the time, those sites were the Opta Index, Planet Football, and Surrey Sports.

Two years later, in July 2002 – the same month that Bonne Terre Limited was founded – Surrey Sports was rebranded and became Sky Bet. The following year, Sky Bet introduced a new casino-focused brand called Sky Bet Vegas, which eventually became Sky Vegas. Bonne Terre Limited’s portfolio of betting and casino sites expanded from there – but as the company grew, it attracted attention from elsewhere.

A series of acquisitions

The past decade has seen the Sky Betting and Gaming brands change hands several times, with Bonne Terre Limited included as part of the package. The first such instance happened in 2015 when Sky plc (formerly BSkyB) agreed to sell 80% of Bonne Terre Limited to an investment company called CVC Capital Partners. The deal was worth £600m to Sky. Three years later. CVC Capital Partners and Sky plc jointly agreed to sell the entire company to The Stars Group, which was a Canada-based iGaming giant. This time, the cost of the deal was £3.4bn. This was the point where the connection between Sky Betting & Gaming and Sky plc was severed. The Bonne Terre sites only continue to use the Sky logo because a licensing agreement has been struck between the companies.

Some of you might have noticed that we spoke about The Stars Group in the past tense. That’s because The Stars Group was, in turn, bought by Flutter Entertainment in 2020. That means all of the Sky-branded sites are now on the same casino network as FanDuel, PokerStars, Paddy Power, Betfair and Tombola. You could make a strong argument for Flutter Entertainment being the biggest iGaming company in the world, with the Sky brands contributing significantly to its success.

Bonne Terre Limited and the UKGC

You can’t legally operate a betting site in the UK without a UK Gambling Commission licence, so it’s reassuring to know that Bonne Terre Limited holds one. In truth, it’s just one of a great many iGaming licences that this casino giant holds – the Sky brands are available across most of Europe and elsewhere, and the operator holds all the appropriate licences to facilitate that.

Unfortunately for Bonne Terre Limited, holding a UK Gambling Commission licence and holding a clean UK Gambling Commission licence isn’t the same thing. In February 2022, the company was fined £1.17m by the regulator after being deemed guilty of sending marketing materials to self-excluded customers. The UKGC further found that Sky-branded betting sites had sent marketing communications to customers who hadn’t consented to receive them.

The total number of players affected was over 41,000 self-excluded customers and almost a quarter of a million players who had previously opted out of marketing, which goes some way to explaining why the fine handed down was a seven-figure one. To Bonne Terre Limited’s credit, the UKGC noted that the operator had taken immediate remedial action upon becoming aware of the failure and had fully co-operated with the investigation.