THE astonishing thing about Party Gaming, the online poker group planning a $10 billion (£5.5 billion) flotation, is the numbers involved. They are huge.

And that’s just the salaries of the board members, executive and non-executive alike. The Gibraltar group, which runs the website Partypoker.com, makes a hefty profit as well.

The founders will become paper billionaires when they sell 23% of their stake to City investors.

Last week, it emerged that the non-executive chairman, Michael Jackson, is to be paid £500,000 and will be handed shares worth £1m. And Richard Segal, appointed almost a year ago as chief executive of Party Gaming, is in line to receive shares worth up to £50m.

Nice work if you can get it. But at least the shopfloor workers are not being left out of the bonanza. The founding shareholders are making 5.6% of the shares available to staff. Every employee will receive options that could be worth two to three times their salary.

Segal is unrepentant about the sums of money the bosses will receive and rejects any suggestion that the company is paying “danger money” because of the questionable legality of its business in its core market, America, which accounts for 88% of sales.

“When you are looking to recruit highly talented individuals, you are competing with the world of venture capital, which is also after highly talented individuals to chair businesses,” said Segal. “The sort of remuneration (we are paying) would not compare favourably with the sort of deals they would be able to negotiate in the venture-capital world.”

Does the same apply to him? “At the time I joined the company, I was also in discussions with more than one venturecapital house about potential opportunities.”

He insisted that Party Gaming had also had to pay top dollar because of a lack of candidates with the required mixture of FTSE 100 experience and industry knowledge: “If we had got people without these credentials, investors would have said we were failing in this important area of corporate governance.”

It will be fascinating to know what the Association of British Insurers and some other corporate-governance sabre-rattlers make of all this if and when the company floats and gets round to holding its annual meeting.

Segal may protest but there is a lingering feeling that the company has had to pay such big fees to get heavyweight names in to lend the business greater credibility.

This craving for acceptance partly explains why the company is coming to market. It hardly needs the money. This is a business throwing off mountains of cash. Last year, it made pre-tax profits of $371.1m on turnover of $601.6m. In the first three months of this year, it has racked up profits of $125.6m.

“We absolutely believe there are compelling reasons to go for an IPO (initial public offering),” said Segal. For one thing, it would help Party Gaming to expand into new territories. He also conceded that transparency and credibility were important as they help to generate trust “not just with consumers but stakeholders as well”. The shares also provide a currency for making acquisitions in what is a highly fragmented market.