Sep. 28--<<<< Nabeel Gareeb, chief executive of MEMC Electronic Materials Inc. in O'Fallon, Mo., cashed in stock options worth $77.7 million to lead all other St. Louis area executives in pay last year.

Gareeb, who has run the silicon wafer maker for nearly seven years, garnered just under $80 million in compensation, including an $850,000 salary and incentive pay of $931,600.

Gareeb's pay was the highest found since the Post-Dispatch began examining executive pay in 1994. He was one of 13 executives whose earnings totaled more than $10 million. Gareeb's pay was more than twice his nearest competitor.

The Post-Dispatch uses information from regulatory filings by area companies to analyze compensation. Public stock companies are required to disclose the compensation of the top five executives who were paid at least $100,000.

The newspaper computes pay using a method developed by The Corporate Library of Portland, Maine. The company monitors corporate governance and pay nationwide. Their methodology gets closer to the compensation that the executive actually receives than the figure that companies are required to list in their proxy statements.

Total compensation includes an executive's salary, bonus, incentive pay, the value of stock options exercised and stock awards that vested in the most recent year as well as changes in the value of pensions and other pay listed in a company's proxy statement.

Gareeb's salary and incentive bonus pale in comparison to his profit on stock options, the result of exercising 1.65 million stock options last year. In addition to last year's $77.7 million gain, Gareeb exercised 1.1 million options in 2005 that netted him $18.3 million and 100,000 options in 2006 for a gain of $3.87 million.

Stock options allow executives to buy stock in the future at a price fixed when the option is issued, usually the market price of the stock when the option is given. An option has no value when it's issued at the market price. As the stock price rises above the exercise price, the option gains value.

When Gareeb arrived at MEMC in 2001, the silicon-wafer manufacturer was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. The stock hit a low of just over $3 a share in September 2002.

An outside investment group, Texas Pacific Group, had bought a controlling interest in the company and made drastic changes, including slashing MEMC's debt, firing the previous chief executive and bringing in Gareeb.

Gareeb received an initial grant of 2.3 million options as an incentive to turn the company around in 2002.