Mukesh Ambani has got company of at least 29 fellow corporate executives, including four from his own group Reliance Industries, in terms of annual salaries running into crores of rupees for the latest fiscal.
These include JSW Energy’s Mr Sajjan Jindal, Hindustan Construction’s Mr Ajit Gulabchand, Raymond’s Mr Gautam Hari Singhania, ICICI Bank’s Ms Chanda Kochhar, Axis Bank’s Ms Shikha Sharma, as also Infosys’ Mr S Gopalakrishnan and Mr S D Shibulal.
Companies are currently in the process of disclosing top management salaries for the financial year ended March 31, 2011 through their annual reports for the period.
Just about a month in the process since the annual reports of listed companies began trickling in late April, as many as 30 top corporate executives have been found to have received annual compensation exceeding Rs 1 crore.
So far, the figures are available for a total of 32 companies, out of which executives at 13 companies received salaries in excess of Rs 1 crore mark in 2010-11, an analysis of information available with financial data aggregator Capitalline shows.
Besides RIL’s Chairman and MD Mr Mukesh Ambani, there are three more top executives from the company - Mr Nikhil Meswani, Mr Hital Meswani, Mr PMS Prasad and Mr Pawan Kumar Kapil - in this elite league.
The list of executives with salaries exceeding Rs 1 crore includes a total of four executives from ICICI Bank, including its chief, and five from IT major Infosys, including Mr TV Mohandas Pai and Mr K Dinesh who recently left the company.
Also, there are three top executives from JSW Energy (Mr NK Jain, Mr Lalit Kumar Gupta and Mr S S Rao) besides its chief. The Infosys executives include Mr Srinath Batni, while those from ICICI Bank include Mr K Ramkumar, Mr N S Kannan and Mr Rajiv Sabharwal.
The total list of executives with such salaries would grow further as more companies reveal their figures in the coming days.
For the previous fiscal 2009-10, there were more than 800 corporate honchos with a pay package of over Rs 1 crore.
For the latest fiscal ended March 31, 2011, the list is so far led by Mr Mukesh Ambani with a pay package of Rs 15 crore - which has remained unchanged for three years now.
As per the figures available so far, Mr Ambani is followed by Mr Nikhil Meswani (Rs 11.05 crore) and Hital Meswani (Rs 11.03 crore).
So far, no one other than these three RIL executives have been found to have got a salary in excess of Rs 10 crore.
However, Mr Mukesh Ambani was not even in the top-10 in terms of salary in 2009-10, when Sun TV Network’s Kalanithi Maran and Kavery Maran were top-earning executives with pay packages of Rs 37.08 crore each.