NEWS Corporation chief operating officer Chase Carey has not only taken over the duties of his predecessor, Peter Chernin, he has taken on the mantle of best-rewarded executive with a $32 million package - four times the size of that of his nearest competitor.
Mr Carey's $US15 million ($A18.58 million) cash bonus outstripped by a factor of almost seven times the other 74 chief executives of S&P/ASX200 companies that have so far published annual reports for the year to June 30 - and none of it was ''at risk''.
Unlike other CEOs in the survey, Mr Carey's bonus is not benchmarked against corporate performance.
The first $US10 million was ''compensation'' to him for voluntarily forfeiting his right to equity in his former employer, DirecTV, when he accepted Rupert Murdoch's offer to rejoin the company.
The other $US5 million was a guaranteed minimum bonus based on News's EPS performance - which meant that he would have received the money whatever happened.
As it turned out, News rebounded from a multibillion-dollar loss to a $US2.54 billion profit.
Of the 75 CEOs' salaries reviewed by The Age, 21 took home bonuses in excess of $1 million for 2010, and a further 15 had their take-home pay fattened by payments of more than $500,000 on top of their weekly wages.
And all but one of those three dozen chiefs finished the year with a total package of more than $1 million.
Still to have their pay packets revealed over the next few months are the major bank bosses and the Westfield shopping centre group's Lowy family - with founder and patriarch Frank Lowy traditionally among the highest-paid executives in Australia.
Some executives, though, will have to wait a year or two before they get all that is coming to them, thanks to a growing trend to defer even short-term incentives, allowing companies the ability to claw back payments at later dates.
Suncorp-Metway's new chief, Patrick Snowball, for example, received only half of the $1.93 million he was awarded, and will have to wait until next year for the balance - and only then if the Queensland bancassurance group sustains its performance.
Embattled phone company Telstra's $3.88 billion profit beat News Corp in the latest year, yet the $3.19 million package of its chief executive, David Thodey, was less than one-tenth of Mr Carey's. Mr Thodey has since had his remuneration increased, and could potentially earn more than $11 million this year.
Chris Lynch, head of toll collector Transurban, which runs the comparatively risk-free CityLink in Melbourne and Lane Cove Tunnel in Sydney, received the largest cash bonus of an Australian-based chief executive, $2.74 million.
His total package, which includes the theoretical value of stock options, was worth more than $6 million. Challenger Financial Services chief Dominic Stevens ranked second after Mr Carey at $7.8 million in the total salary package stakes, including a $1.1 million cash bonus.
Then again, combined cash bonuses at News Corp for Mr Carey, Rupert Murdoch, his son James Murdoch, chief financial officer David De Voe and Fox News chief Roger Ailes topped $US33 million - which is more than the entire 2010 profits of several companies in the survey.
