Sprint Corp. CEO Marcelo Claure made $21.8 million in eight months, filing shows

In just less than eight months, Sprint Corp. chief executive Marcelo Claure earned nearly $21.8 million, a company filing showed.

A mix of cash, stock and other compensation covered Claure’s pay from his first day in mid-August to the end of March, when the Overland Park-based wireless company’s fiscal year ended.

Sprint named Claure to replace Dan Hesse last summer after plans to seek a merger with T-Mobile US Inc. fell apart. Hesse, according to the company’s report, earned $10.5 million in the last fiscal year before leaving.

Claure received a $1.5 million annual salary, prorated for the roughly eight months since he had joined Sprint, a $500,000 signing bonus, and other payments for total cash compensation of $3.34 million.

Stock awards and stock options, valued under federal rules, ballooned the total by $18.3 million. Other compensation lifted the final total to nearly $21.8 million for Sprint’s 2014 fiscal year.

Sprint spokeswoman Jennifer Schuler said that Claure’s reported stock and options compensation was particularly large because they counted some grants for Sprint’s 2015 fiscal year, which is underway. The company made equity grants to Claure covering both years when he became CEO last summer.

Usually, the awards for 2015 would be expected to show up in the company’s next compensation report.

But many of these were stock and option awards that will become Claure’s simply through the passage of time, rather than based on how well the company performs. They were included in this report under federal disclosure requirements that look at when time-based grants are made, not when they are collected.

“He is not receiving a (time-based) grant under our 2015 incentive plan because that was already done back in August of last year when he started with the company,” Schuler said.

The grand total easily made Claure, who was a billionaire Miami businessman before joining Sprint, the highest paid executive in the Kansas City area. He more than doubled the $10.8 million in compensation that James Welch, the chief executive of Overland park-based YRC Worldwide Inc., earned in all of 2014.

Under Claure, Sprint has introduced aggressive new marketing campaigns, improved its rankings among network comparisons and halted an outflow of subscribers.

Sprint reported Claure’s pay to shareholders in its proxy statement ahead of the company’s Aug. 7 annual meeting.

This story was originally published June 29, 2015 at 10:14 AM.