Gates, Ballmer get 13% pay hike

Microsoft Corp’s top two executives received 13 per cent raises in the past year, with chairman Bill Gates and chief executive Steve Ba...

Microsoft Corp’s top two executives received 13 per cent raises in the past year, with chairman Bill Gates and chief executive Steve Ballmer each earning $753,310 in salary and bonuses, the company disclosed.

Gates, who owns 11.6 per cent of the software giant, and Ballmer each got a base salary of $547,500 and a bonus of $205,810 in fiscal year 2002, according to a document filed on Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But the two weren’t the highest-paid executives at the company.

James Allchin, the platforms group vice-president, earned $495,195 in salary and a $400,000 bonus — the most of any executive still working at Microsoft.

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Former president Richard Belluzzo, who left Microsoft earlier this year, earned $918,723 in salary and bonus and $13 million in ‘all other compensation.’ That reflects the remaining portion of a $ 15 million advance Microsoft made to Belluzzo in December 2000 as a guaranteed minimum of what his stock option would be worth as they vested.

Microsoft disclosed that it made a similar arrangement in November 2000 with Richard Emerson, senior vice-president of corporate development. The company advanced him $12 million, as part of its efforts to recruit him from the investment banking field.

Financial arrangements such as these are now illegal under the corporate-reform directives laid out under the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Microsoft ‘in the future will not enter into these forms of transactions for its executive officers or directors,’ the filing said.