With 45% hike, Mukesh gets Rs 44 cr pay

Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) has given its chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani, the country’s richest person, a pay hike of 45 per cent to take his annual remuneration to over $10 million. Ambani got a total payout of Rs 44.02 crore in 2007-08, marking an increase of Rs 13.5 crore from the previous fiscal. In 2006-07, his annual remuneration had increased to Rs 30.46 crore from Rs 24.77 crore previously. However, a large part of his full-year pay cheque comes from commissions the company pays to select executives as a ratio of its net profits.

According to the company’s annual report being sent to shareholders, Ambani got a salary of Rs 60 lakh (Rs 5 lakh per month) and another Rs 48 lakh (Rs 4 lakh per month) in the name of “perquisites and allowances”. In addition, he got Rs 18.75 lakh under the head of “retiral benefits” and Rs 4,275.44 lakh toward commission on net profit, taking his total to Rs 4,402.19 lakh for 2007-08. The RIL Chief was the top-paid executive in fiscal 2006-07, followed by Madras Cement’s chairman and MD P R R Rajha, who had an annual payout of about Rs 24.8 crore. However, Ambani, who was ranked the world’s fifth richest by Forbes magazine earlier this year with a net worth of $43 billion, may not find a place even among the 200 most paid chiefs globally.

Forbes named Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellision at the top of the 500 most paid CEOs in the US with a pay cheque of $192.9 million. A total of 177 CEOs in the list had a salary of over $10 million. It is not yet clear whether Ambani would be the highest paid executive in India for 2007-08, as most companies are yet to disclose the remuneration figures for that year.