£2.25m payday for new man at struggling B&B

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That is double what his predecessor Steve Crawshaw earned last year and nearly three times what Pym earned in his final year as chief executive of rival Alliance & Leicester.

Pym is on a basic salary of £750,000 but is guaranteed the same again as a cash bonus by next June and the same in free shares. He also gets £1.5 million worth of share options based on today's price.

Pym, 59 next month, was paid only £860,000 when he retired from Alliance & Leicester in November last year although he had also accumulated a pension of more than £300,000 a year.

The news emerged as B&B admitted most of its shareholders have shunned its £400 million rights issue.

The bank said its "third time lucky" share issue had been accepted by just 27.84% of its shareholders.

Assuming that the big four institutional shareholders - Standard Life, Legal & General, M&G and Barclays Global - who own just over 13% of the company between them and had agreed to sub-underwrite the fundraising have taken up all their rights, less than 15% was taken up by other shareholders.

B&B's army of 850,000 small shareholders, who have mostly held their shares since the building society demutualised eight years ago, appear to have turned their backs on the rights issue.

The lead underwriters to the issue, Citigroup and UBS, now have an unusually long period of time - up until the close of business on Friday - to try to sell on the 597 million shares, or £328 million worth, which have not been taken up by existing shareholders.

In effect they are gambling on the share price rising sufficiently above the rights issue price of 55p in the coming week for them to be able to offload the rump of the issue. Today the shares rose just ¼p to 55p.

B&B investors, who have seen their shares fall by 75% this year, are optimistic Pym will engineer a takeover of the bank after Alliance & Leicester agreed a £1.3 billion bid from Spain's Santander. But analyst Alex Potter of Numis said he thought this unlikely given B&B's weak brand, exposure to the buy-to-let market and limited branch network.