A man who became addicted to gambling is suing a bookmaker for continuing to take his bets and allowing him to lose more than £2 million on golf, football and horse racing.

Graham Calvert, 28, a greyhound trainer from Tyne and Wear, says that he had asked William Hill to bar him from their betting shops because of his compulsive habit.

Over 16 months, beginning in August 2005, he placed £7.5 million on the outcomes of sporting events, sometimes walking into the betting shop with bin liners filled with £100,000 in cash.

He had been earning £30,000 a month and began betting £1,000 to £5,000 a time; his stakes rose over time to single bets of £30,000.

A year into this betting spree, he says, he recognised that he was suffering from an addiction and sought to curtail his own behaviour. In May 2006 he asked William Hill to ban him.

However, later that summer he says he was able to open another account and resume placing large bets, including one £347,000 bet backing America to win the Ryder Cup. They lost.

He now owes £1.5 million and says his life is in ruins: his wife has left him, taking their two young children with her.

His solicitor, Tiejha Smyth, said: “He was allowed to continue gambling after Hill's agreed he should be self-excluded. They should be held legally responsible.”

He is suing the bookmaker for the £2 million he lost after he asked to be barred. “If I’d known I had the problem and didn’t do anything about it, I would see myself as being 100 per cent responsible,” he told the BBC.

“The fact is that I did try to go through the right procedures and I was let down.”

The case opens at the High Court next week. William Hill has said it will contest the allegations.

The case comes a month after the mother of a mentally disabled man from Bournemouth, permitted to continue gambling after several local bookmakers had agreed to exclude him, called for gambling regulations to be tightened.

Sue Mottram’s son Alex, 39, had suffered severe brain injuries during a cycling race when he was 16. Having gambled away most of the compensation money he received for the accident, he had signed six-month self-exclusion agreements with a number of bookmakers in the area, his mother said. He was subsequently allowed to gamble during the six-month period, she said.

The Gambling Commission, which regulates the industry, said at the time that since September 1, 2007 licensed betting operators were required to promote “socially responsible gambling” under the Gambling Act 2005. This included an obligation for licensees to “put in place procedures for self-exclusion and take all reasonable steps to refuse service or to otherwise prevent an individual who has entered a self-exclusion agreement from participating in gambling".

The self-exclusion period is a minimum of six months but customers should be given the option of extending this to a total of at least five years.

Paul Devlin, director of services at the brain injuries association Headway, said the Gambling Commission’s rules on self-exclusion still assumed that gamblers had “sufficient decision-making capacity to exclude themselves”.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Queen uses Christmas speech to praise Forces
• Helmand Christmas — the briefest of respites
• Hard work — but the finest bacon