Gala Coral Group Ltd is a British betting shop, bingo and casino operator. It is owned by private equity houses Candover Investments, Cinven and Permira. In October 2005 it merged with Coral Eurobet for £2.18 billion. The acquisition made it the UK's third largest bookmaker and largest bingo operator. It also owns over 30 casinos. Coral will remain a brand and trading division of the new group. Private equity is a broad term that refers to any type of equity investment in an asset in which the equity is not freely tradable on a public stock market. ... Cinven is a European private equity firm founded in 1977 with offices in London, Paris, and Frankfurt. ... Permira is an international, private equity firm based in the United Kingdom. ... Housie is a gambling game played in New Zealand, Australia and the UK, where it is called Bingo. ...

The Group also recently acquired the Victor Chandler group of shops bringing their total estate to over 1320 shops.

History

Joe Coral (born Joseph Kagarlitski) began his bookmaking business in 1926 and, although primarily concerned with operating betting pitches at racecourses, he did open a credit office in the West End of London in 1943. A bookmaker, or a bookie, is an organisation or a person that takes bets and may pay winnings depending upon results and, depending on the nature of the bet, the United States, with Singapore and Canada, the only legal bookmaker is state_owned and operated. ...

He was, though, one of the first to take advantage of the new legislation and duly opened his first licensed betting office in 1961. The new law was, however, not intended to encourage betting and therefore shops were positively unattractive in appearance and devoid of any comforts.

By 1962 there were 13,340 betting offices of which Coral owned 23. During the seventies the situation changed completely and by 1977 four major bookmakers had evolved (including Coral) who owned nearly 24% of the 13,254 shops operating. Coral's number had originally grown to 589 as a result of a merger with another bookmaker, Mark Lane in 1971.

By 1975 the company had become the Coral Leisure Group and had diversified to include a variety of other leisure activities comprising social clubs, casinos, hotels and later holiday camps. For other uses, see Casino (disambiguation). ...

In January 1981, however, the Coral Group was acquired by Bass plc and although it continued to retain the Coral name it became an integral part of the growing Bass Leisure. Bass is one of the oldest established UK companies, William Bass having started the brewing operation in 1777.

With Bass support the number of Coral shops continued to grow during the 80's via acquisitions of Bartletts and Heathorns (in 1984), with 13 and 47 shops respectively, PTS (in 1985) with 41 shops and Leisure Bookmakers (in 1989) with 60 shops.

The private ownership meant that more acquisitions were to come and by the time Coral joined Gala the number of shops had grown to 1260.

At the 2006 UK Gambling Awards, Coral was named "Bookmaker of the Year".

The headquarters are in Nottingham, Barking & Woking.

External links

• Official site