RECENTLY appointed Boylesports chief executive Lee Richardson is leaving the Irish bookmaking chain for family reasons.

Staff at the chain’s headquarters in Dundalk, Co Louth, were told this week that Mr Richardson is stepping down.

John Boyle, the chain’s founder and owner, will take over as acting chief executive. There are no immediate plans to replace Mr Richardson.

While Mr Boyle stood back from running the company early in the decade, he remained involved with the business on a day-to-day basis, and a spokesman said yesterday that he is well prepared to reassume the chief executive’s role.

Boylesports, the largest privately owned bookmaking chain in the country, appointed Mr Richardson to the top job last March, during the build-up to key race meetings such as the Cheltenham and Punchestown national hunt festivals.

Its spokesman said Mr Richardson is leaving the business for family reasons and intends returning to Britain at the end of the month.

He joined the company from gaming software developer Chartwell Games. Previous to that, he was Coral Eurobet’s chief operations officer, where he had responsibility for developing the group’s online sports betting and gaming businesses.

In the late nineties, Mr Richardson was managing director of Tote direct, a joint venture between the British Tote, Ladbrokes and Coral.

In that role he led the team that developed the Scoop 6, a jackpot-style bet based on the British races televised on Channel Four on Saturday afternoon that is popular with Irish and British punters.

Boylesports turnover in its online and retail businesses suffered over the last two years as the economy went into recession.

The firm recently ended a number of high-profile sponsorships, one with English premiership football club Sunderland, and the other with Cheltenham racecourse, where it was the main backer of a two-day meeting in December. The company said both contracts had come to an end and added that both deals had achieved the goals the firm set out for them when it originally entered into them.

A spokesman said yesterday that the chain is seeing signs of a return to growth in turnover in its 140 betting shops in Ireland.

He added that the business intends to concentrate on this and on the further development of its online operations. “That will be our focus for the time being,” he said.

The initial indications from publicly quoted bookmakers are that they enjoyed a reasonably good first half, with results at the Cheltenham Festival and World Cup in South Africa favouring them rather than their customers.