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It is no secret that Kalanithi Maran and his wife Kavery Kalanithi, promoters of Chennai-based Sun TV Network Ltd, are among the highest-paid corporate executives in the country. However, a recent report by Mumbai-based proxy advisory SES shows how skewed their pay is in comparison to the employees in the company they own.
The SES report reveals that Maran had a pay packet of ₹71.47 crore in FY16, while his wife took home ₹71.46 crore. This is over seventy times the remuneration of the media network’s MD and CEO K Vijaykumar, who earned ₹1.08 crore over the same period.
Stakeholders Empowerment Services (SES) has advised shareholders to vote against Kavery Kalanithi’s re-appointment as Director at the company’s AGM next Friday, on account of the company’s unfair remuneration practices. She is slated to retire from the post, by rotation.
‘Superhuman’ promoters“If one goes by the logic of ‘equal pay for equal work’ among the directors, the Marans would qualify as superhumans, as both are individually putting in almost 66 times more work compared to the non-promoter executive director (Vijaykumar),” the report noted.
The ratio of board compensation is skewed even further when compared with the non-executive and independent directors on Sun TV’s board. In FY16, the two promoters drew almost 14,000 times the remuneration of a non-executive director (who earned ₹50,000 for the year) and almost 4,300 times the remuneration paid to the independent directors. This is after the non-executive and independent directors earned a significant pay hike in FY16.
Their pay in FY15 was ₹8,000 and ₹96,000, as against the Maran couple’s then individual pay packets of ₹61.27 crore. “I’ve never seen another company where the promoter-directors feel that it is they who are the company and so take home 154 per cent of the entire company’s wage bill for 1,906 employees,” said JN Gupta, Co-Founder and MD, SES. “This is a failure of the role of independent directors in a company,” he added.
When asked, Sun TV declined to comment on the contents of the SES report.
Even when compared to peers, the promoters’ pay seems extreme. Both Sun TV and Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd reported net profits close to ₹860 crore for FY16. However, Punit Goenka, part of the promoter group at Zee, drew ₹6.79 crore in remuneration last fiscal.
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