T-Mobile Paid Top Lawyer Nelson Nearly $12.5 Million Last Year

[ad_1]

T-Mobile US Inc. paid its top lawyer Mark Nelson almost $12.5 million last year as the company battled telecommunications industry competitors for customers and wireless spectrum.

Nelson received $8.4 million in stock awards and roughly $4 million in cash, including $950,000 in base salary, according to a T-Mobile proxy statement.

T-Mobile recruited Nelson to succeed its former legal chief David Miller, who retired last year from the company. Nelson is a former outside counsel to T-Mobile who specialized in antitrust litigation across nearly three decades at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in Washington.

T-Mobile joined Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. last month in becoming the third telecommunications company to miss sales and subscriber estimates as the industry copes with a slowdown in consumer spending.

AT&T and Verizon disclosed in April that their top lawyers collectively earned almost $20 million in total compensation last year.

T-Mobile previously disclosed that Nelson received a $13.8 million pay package, including a $2 million signing bonus, after coming aboard in late 2021.

Nelson owns nearly $15.2 million in T-Mobile stock, according to Bloomberg data. The Bellevue, Wash.-based company also paid him $63,300 last year in relocation expenses, according to its proxy.

Nelson and Cleary worked with lawyers from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr in defeating a lawsuit filed by state attorneys general to block T-Mobile’s merger with Sprint Corp., a tie-up of the third- and fourth-largest US wireless carriers.

Clinching that $26.5 billion deal in 2020 saw T-Mobile pass AT&T to become the second-largest US wireless carrier, trailing only Verizon.

T-Mobile turned to Cleary again this past March to handle its nearly $1.4 billion bid for Ka’ena Corp., the parent company of Mint Mobile, a budget wireless and mobile phone provider partly owned by actor and entrepreneur Ryan Reynolds.

T-Mobile is majority owned by Germany’s Deutsche Telekom AG.

[ad_2]

Source link