In the fight to help Sprint Nextel pull themselves from the trenches of mobile warfare, an investory advisory firm (Glass Lewis) deemed Sprint Nextel Corp executives as the most overpaid in corporate America.  Apparently as the Sprint Nextel stock price plummeted over the past year, top managers were awarded pay valued at nearly $74 million while the mobile communications service provider had the worst 2007 pay-for-performance rating among the Standard & Poor’s 500 index of large companies.

Now the moment you’ve been waiting for, the response from Sprint Nextel:

“It’s very important to consider that 2007 was a highly unusual year because of compensation that was paid to an exiting CEO, as well as sign-on compensation paid to a new CEO,” Sprint spokesman James Fisher said. “We had significant other severance charges for executive changes during the year.”

Via Reuters