Petfre Gibraltar casinos

Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited Information

Who are Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited?

If you were to look at the name “Petfre” in isolation and were told to guess which well-known betting operation it was linked to, you might hazard a guess that someone’s made a typo while attempting to type “Betfred.” You wouldn’t be accurate on the typo part of that scenario, but you’d be entirely correct about the company’s identified. Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited is little more than an offshore base for the online operations of Betfred, which is one of the UK’s best-known names when it comes to sports betting.

Those of you who are regular (or even semi-regular) visitors to Betfred will know that there’s a lot more to the operator’s primary iGaming site these days than merely offering sports betting. There’s also Betfred Casino, Betfred Poker and Betfred Bingo, to name just a few of the various Betfred sub-brands. There’s also Oddsking, which is the only non-Betfred-branded iGaming site operating under the Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited umbrella. Let’s take a closer look at the inner workings of this well-known name.

An overview of Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited

The Gibraltar address of Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited is merely a convenient headquarters in a European tax haven, making it easier for the company to conduct its online operations. The true headquarters of The Betfred Group Limited is in Warrington, very close to where the company was founded more than fifty years ago. However, the current version of Betfred Group Limited is not the original. This current incarnation was incorporated in July 2011. It was a re-organisation of the group rather than a rebirth.

According to the official Betfred LinkedIn profile, the company currently employs around 9500 people, which is an enormous number. However, most of those people are employed in the Betfred betting shops, of which there are more than 1300. The company’s online operations are far smaller, although there are clearly enough people working on the Betfred website to ensure it maintains its status as one of the UK’s most popular sports betting options. In 2021, which is the most recent year that figures are available for, Betfred posted revenue of £525m, £412m of which was gross profit.

Betfred history

Betfred is so named because the business was founded by Fred Done in his native Salford in 1967. The legality of opening betting shops had only recently been defined by the UK Government of the time, so when Fred opened his first shop, it would still have been a novelty. Fred had been interested in gambling long before opening his shop, though; in fact, the money that paid for setting it up and opening it came from a winning wager he’d placed in England to win the World Cup the previous year.

While “Betfred” is a very familiar name now, that wasn’t the original name of the company. The first shop that Fred Done opened – and quite a few afterwards – was called “Done Bookmakers,” reflecting the fact that Fred’s brother Peter worked with him at the shop. Prior to going into business together, the Done brothers had worked for their father’s illegal bookmaking business. Both of them dropped out of school at fifteen, and neither of them had any formal qualifications. You’d never have guessed that they were destined for international success – especially with a name like “Done Bookmakers,” which could easily be interpreted as “you’ve been done by the bookies” – but fate had other ideas.

Becoming Betfred

Initially, the Done Bookmakers business made slow progress. Fred didn’t initially have any ambitions beyond operating a single betting shop, but he eventually grew to see the value in expansion. That process of expansion began in the 1970s, building up slowly but surely, to the point where the company opened its seventieth shop in the mid-1980s. The first time the company made the national news, though, was in 1998 when the company became the first in history to pay out early on the winners of the English Premier League. The problem for Done Bookmakers was that they paid out on the wrong team. Manchester United’s dominant lead persuaded Done to call the race and settle all bets on the Red Devils early. In the end, Arsenal pegged United back and won the league. It was an expensive instance for the business, but the publicity it attracted was priceless.

The Done brothers established Peninsula Business Services in 1983, which is an umbrella company containing more than ten companies working in fields like human resources and employment law. Peter Done took a more active interest in that new venture than Fred did, eventually leading to Peter branching off in that direction and Fred taking sole charge of Done Bookmakers. Because of that, and also because of the need to come up with a catchier name suitable for the internet age, Done Bookmakers became Betfred in 2004.

Betfred in the modern age

Although the change to the Betfred name was a move made with the internet in mind, the first version of the Betfred website didn’t go live until later that same year. At first, the offline side of the business remained more lucrative. Part of that was down to ongoing publicity – in November 2004, a customer in the original Betfred Salford betting shop became the first punter in UK history to win more than £1m from a tote bet.

As the online side of the business continued to grow, so did the offline side. By 2005, Betfred had more than five hundred betting shops, the five-hundredth being the one that the company opened in Cardiff that year, representing Betfred’s first venture into Wales. In 2013, Betfred launched a television channel called Betfred TV, which remains available within all of the company’s shops and at selected racecourses. At the time, it was the first television channel of its time in the UK. Betfred has always been a pioneering brand.

In the present day, Betfred operates more than 1600 shops across the UK, including a package of more than 300 shops that Ladbrokes and Coral elected to sell off in 2016. That figure doesn’t include the multiple Betfred stalls at racecourses all over the country. The company was the official betting partner of Manchester United – the football club that Fred Done supports – for several years and has also sponsored the Scottish League Cup. Prominent Betfred football shirt sponsorships have included Bolton Wanderers and also RCD Mallorca in Spain. Betfred is also the primary sponsor of the rugby Super League.

As for Fred Done, he stepped down as CEO of the company in 2021 at the age of 78. Far from retiring, though, Fred stayed on in the role of chairman. His personal wealth has been estimated by the Sunday Times as being in the region of £1.2bn. The value of his company is considerably higher than that.

Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited and the UK Gambling Commission

Betfred wouldn’t be able to operate in either an offline or an online capacity if it didn’t hold a licence with the UK Gambling Commission, which it does. In fact, the company holds two – one for its betting shops and one for its online operations. The licence for the company’s betting shops is held by Done Brothers (Cash Betting) Limited under account number 1058 and is clean. The operating licence for the company’s websites is held by Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited under reference 39544, but, regrettably, it isn’t quite as clean.

In September 2022, Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited was handed a formal financial penalty and warned about its future conduct by the UK Gambling Commission. This came after the regulator undertook a review of the company’s operations and licence. It found that multiple licence breaches had taken place between October 2019 and December 2020, including breaches of anti-money laundering rules and failure to comply with social responsibility codes of practice around customer interaction. For these failures, the operator was fined £2.87m. It was noted that Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited had co-operated with the investigation and that immediate corrective steps had been taken in response to the identified failings.

A separate investigation later determined that source-of-funds checks hadn’t been carried out on a customer who deposited £210,000 in just twelve days in November 2017. The money turned out to have been stolen. Petfre was ordered to repay the victim of the theft and was further asked to pay £182,000 to the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms in lieu of a formal financial penalty.