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Billionaire Mukesh Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Group, has foregone his entire salary voluntarily for the second time in a row last fiscal in light of the Covid pandemic hitting the business and economy.
Ambani did not avail of any allowances, perquisites, retiral benefits, commission or stock options from Reliance for his role as the Chairman and Managing Director, as per the company’s latest annual report.
Salary capped
Interestingly, Ambani had capped his salary at ₹15 crore for the last 11 years in order to set a personal example of moderation in managerial compensation levels. He has kept his salary, perquisites, allowances and commission together at ₹15 crore since 2008-09, forgoing over ₹24 crore per annum.
The remuneration of Ambani’s cousins Nikhil and Hital Meswani remained unchanged at ₹24 crore, but included a ₹17.28 crore commission in FY22.
Executive Directors PMS Prasad and Pawan Kumar Kapil’s remuneration fell marginally to ₹11.89 crore and ₹4.22 crore last fiscal against ₹11.99 crore and ₹4.24 crore received in the previous year. The payment for Prasad and Kapil includes “performance-linked incentives for FY21 paid in FY22,” said the annual report.
Ambani’s wife Nita, a non-executive director on the company, earned ₹5 lakh as a sitting fee and another ₹2-crore commission last year. She had, in the previous year, got ₹8 lakh sitting fee and another ₹1.65 crore as commission.
Apart from Ambani, the RIL board has the Meswani brothers, Prasad and Kapil as wholetime directors. Besides Nita Ambani, other non-executive directors include Dipak C Jain, Raghunath A Mashelkar, Adil Zainulbhai, Raminder Singh Gujral, Shumeet Banerji, former SBI chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya and former CVC KV Chowdary.
All the independent directors got ₹2 crore commission, Yasir O Al-Rumayyan, Managing Director and a Board Member of PIF – the sovereign wealth fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, got ₹1.40 crore. He was appointed to the board with effect on July 19, 2021.
Financial performance
The cut in pay packages of senior executives in Reliance comes even as the company posted a 47 per cent jump in revenues to ₹792,756 crore and 26 per cent rise in net profit to ₹67,845 crore for FY22.
Reliance’s consolidated contribution to the national exchequer jumped 39 per cent to ₹188,012 crore in FY22 from ₹135,468 crore of FY21. This was 5.4 per cent of the government’s budgeted expenditure for FY22 of ₹34.83 lakh crore, per the report.
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