NEW YORK: Keith Rupert, the seventy-six year old chieftain of Clan Murdoch, was garlanded by his dutiful acolytes with compensation to the value of $24.3 million (€17.64m; £11.98m) for the year ended June 30, the New York Times revealed Friday.

In addition to a $3.6m pay hike that lifted his annual salary to $8.1m, the patriarch also received a bonus of $15.8m and additional compensation of $356,175, comprising $337,427 for personal use of corporate aircraft, $11,998 for personal use of company cars and $6,750 in retirement plan payments.

All of which was sanctioned in the name of "pay parity" by NewsCorp's four-strong compensation committee, chaired by Andrew S B Knight, a former chairman of NewsCorp's UK subsidiary News International, and these days a non-executive director of Rothschild Investment Trust Capital Partners.

The other members of this fiercely independent quartet of NewsCorp directors are fellow-Australian and ex-eo of British Airways, Sir Roderick I Eddington; venture capitalist Thomas J Perkins; and NewsCorp's resident gopher in the People's Paradise, Professor John L Thornton, director of Global Leadership at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Data sourced from New York Times; additional content by WARC staff