6 Indians in Forbes list of 500 highest-paid CEOs

New York: Six business leaders of Indian origin figure in business magazine Forbes list of 500 highest-paid CEOs.

Business software giant Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison tops the list. Forbes put his total compensation for 2007 at $192.92 million, which includes $1 million in salary and $182 million from exercise of vested stock options.

Investment guru Warren Buffett, the world’s richest man and chief of Berkshire Hathaway, is ranked 497th with a pay packet of $0.10 million dollars.

Ranks are based on total compensation for the latest fiscal year, which includes salary, bonus and other compensation, like vested restricted stock grants and the value realized by exercising stock options.

Beverages giant Pepsico’s chief Indra K Nooyi is the top Indian-origin CEO in the list. She is ranked 139th. The list put he pay packet at $12.74 million.

She if followed by Shantanu Narayen of software major Adobe Systems (154th), Raj L Gupta of specialty chemicals firm Rohm and Haas (399th), Surya N Mohapatra of healthcare equipment maker Quest Diagnostics (406th), Francisco D'Souza (487th) of software solutions provider Cognizant Technology, and banking firm Citigroup's CEO Vikram Pandit (495th)

Adobe's Shantanu Narayen's pay packet has been put at $11.99 million.

Raj L Gupta, who has been the CEO of Rohm & Haas for nine year, got a total compensation of $2.98 million last year.

Mohapatra, chief executive of Quest Diagnostics for four years, takes home a pay of $2.88 million.

D'Souza, who has been Cognizant CEO for about a year, received $0.86 million in compensation.

The magazine said that Amazon.com chief Jeffrey Bezos has emerged as the "most valuable boss" in its annual rankings, when compared on the basis of efficiency.

"Over the past six years, Bezos has been paid a modest one million dollars (salary plus other compensation) per year while delivering a 32 per cent annual return to shareholders," it said. The efficiency score has been calculated only for those CEOs with a six-year tenure and compensation history.

The magazine said that after a "38 per cent collective pay raise in 2006, chief executives of the 500 biggest companies in the US (as measured by a composite ranking of sales, profits, assets and market value) took a pay cut of 15 per cent last year.

The last time the big bosses took a pay hit was in 2002. In total, these 500 executives earned $6.4 billion in 2007, an average of $12.8 million apiece.