KEY POINTS:
SYDNEY - Former All Blacks rugby captain David Kirk took a pay cut but still earned close to A$3 million in the past year, the Fairfax Media annual report showed.
Kirk, the Sydney-based Fairfax Media chief executive, earned a total of A$2.76 million ($3.26 million) in salary, bonuses, superannuation and shares for the 2006-07 year, compared with A$2.84 million for the previous year.
His 2007 remuneration included A$400,000 of a A$1.2 million compensation payment he was given to join the company "in lieu of benefits forgone from previous employment", The Australian newspaper reported.
The report said Kirk has salary-sacrificed all of the A$1.2 million in benefits into a plan to purchase Fairfax shares, leaving the total value of his shareholding at about A$1.93 million (based on yesterday's A$4.71 closing level).
That was small change, however, compared with other major media chief executives such as Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd (PBL) boss John Alexander, whose 1.8 million shares in that group are worth A$35.5 million.
Amid new long-term incentives for senior executives, Mr Kirk's "annual performance bonus entitlement" has dropped from up to 150 per cent of his base salary of $1.7 million a year, to up to 100 per cent.
Kirk, still the only All Blacks captain to win a World Cup (in 1987), is currently in France as a columnist, appearing in Britain's Sunday Telegraph and Fairfax publications.
He wrote at the weekend he felt "uneasy" that the current team had yet to face a moment of reckoning, something all winners had to go through to prove their mettle.
"The time will surely come when the 2007 All Blacks will stand on the edge of the precipice that their 1991, 1995, 1999 and 2003 predecessors have fallen into," he said as the All Blacks prepare to face France in Sunday's quarterfinal.
"There will be a time when the stomach churns, the limbs feel like water and doubt crouches in the hallway. It will be then that we will know just how great this All Black team is. "
Meanwhile, the board of Fairfax Media awarded itself a uniform 20 per cent pay rise, according to its 2007 annual report.
It shows the remuneration of the group's key management personnel - excluding Kirk - rose by 35 per cent to A$4.5 million for the year to June 30.
Fairfax Media publications include the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, while Fairfax New Zealand publications include the Sunday Star-Times, The Dominion Post and The Press.
- NZPA
