Pay packet of Aviva's departing chief executive

Andrew Moss has lost his job but he is not leaving empty handed. And if you're ready for an example of how complex executive pay has become, here we go.

He will receive a lump sum of £300,000 in the next month, a settlement of the bonus that he might have received had he not been forced out of his job. That is clearly a lot of money, but it is only ten percent of what he got last year from annual and long term bonuses.

On top of that he'll continue to get his £960,000 salary for the rest of the year as he had a 12 month contract. If he gets another job those payments will stop, but if not they will continue.

He'll get a further £209,000 towards his pension this year - he won't be able to cash it in for another 5 years. He will also, next March, get a long term bonus in shares that was awarded in 2009. At today's price that would be worth £240,000.

So in total, he walks away with a potential 1.79 million pounds.

However the pay committee has decided that he will not get any of the cash from long term bonus plans from 2010 and 2011 that at today's share price would have been worth a further 2.4 million pounds.

While clearly his pay off is a vast sum of money to the vast majority of us, it's less than half that what he might have been due even just from those long term deals.