Sarin: Vodafone's £21m fat cat

Arun Sarin, the man who will replace Sir Christopher Gent as Vodafone chief executive next year, is one of the original telecoms boom fat cats after earning a staggering £21m from a takeover deal involving the mobile phone giant in 2000.

But he will have to accept a pay cut when he returns to the company in July, with an annual salary of just £1.1m and a severely trimmed incentives scheme.

The former Vodafone employee, who is coming back after a two-year break, was propelled to the top of the Guardian-Inbucon pay survey in 2000 after reaping a share options windfall.

He was paid a total of £21.2m in 2000 after the company he ran, the US-based AirTouch Communications, was snapped up by Vodafone in a £38bn takeover in January 1999.

He then held the post of chief executive of Vodafone's US and Asia operations until 2000.

Mr Sarin was a significant player in several multibillion dollar deals - including the AirTouch merger, Vodafone's hostile bid for German rival Mannesmann and the creation of Verizon Wireless, which was formed when Bell Atlantic and Vodafone merged their American mobile businesses.

Most of his £21m windfall came from share options paid following Vodafone's takeover of AirTouch.

Mr Sarin, an Indian-born US citizen, is known to get on well with the cricket-loving Sir Christopher, and he was hotly tipped to take the post when shareholders first muttered about the need for executive change two years ago.

At the time, financial advisers to Vodafone told journalists he would be an ideal complement to Gent a few years down the line.

However, the days of the multimillion pound pay cheques for Vodafone executives are well and truly over following a shareholder revolt earlier this year. Mr Sarin will inherit Sir Christopher's heavily trimmed remuneration scheme.

He was also paid a total of £5.7m by Vodafone in the year to March 2001.

Vodafone is one of the most generous executive employers in the world, handing out £51.9m to executives in 2001, while investors saw the value of their shares plummet by £90bn in the same period.

As well as being a generous employer, Vodafone is also a generous sacker, giving £40m in payoffs to executives at Mannesmann, the German mobile phone giant it bought in 2000.

Mr Sarin, 48, is an MBA graduate from the University of California and undertook pioneering work for the mobile phone industry in the 1980s. He went on to become vice president of Pacific Bell, the US telecoms giant before joining AirTouch and rising to chief executive of the company.

After quitting Vodafone in 2000, he got his current job as chief executive of Accel-KKR Telecom, a telecoms investment firm.