New Delhi : Hero MotoCorp’s promoter Pawan Munjal is the highest paid director among the top listed private companies and took home a pay packet of nearly Rs 44 crore last fiscal; this was 1.84 per cent of his company’s net profit. Two other executives of the company were in the second and third spot. Desh Bandhu Gupta, chairman of Lupin, earned a salary of Rs 37.58 crore while Larsen & Toubro chairman A M Naik drew an annual remuneration of Rs 27.32 crore. An analysis of the salary of 95 directors in Nifty companies shows that on an average remuneration of a director is Rs 9 crore. All the top 10 directors were paid remuneration in excess of Rs 19 crore.
A total of 34 Nifty-50 companies disclosed pay-ratios, while three firms — Bajaj Auto, Bosch and Maruti Suzuki — shied away from making any such disclosures. The Index has 10 PSUs which are exempted from making such disclosures. Notably, the top three highest paid directors were from Hero MotoCorp and Lupin also contributed two directors to the top-10 list. Interestingly, seven out of these 10 directors are promoters of their respective companies.
Among others in the top 10 are Bharti Airtel’s Sunil Bharti Mittal (Rs 27.18 crore), Vinita Gupta, CEO of Lupin (Rs 24.86 crore), Hindalco MD D Bhattacharya (Rs 21.59 crore), TCS MD N Chandrasekaran (Rs 21.28 crore) and Ultratech Cement’s Kumar Mangalam Birla (Rs 19.04 crore). As per the report, as many as eight directors were paid remuneration that was more than one per cent of the standalone net profits of their companies with the highest being 2.33 per cent awarded to Bhattacharya. On the other hand, the pay package of 16 directors was less than 0.05 per cent of the net profits of their firms. “Remuneration of 11 directors was more than 400 times the median employee remuneration of their companies. This included three directors each of Lupin and Hero MotoCorp and one each of Hindalco, L&T, Cipla, ITC and TCS”, it said.
