The chief executive of Alliance & Leicester (A&L) will receive a bonus of up to £750,000 if he remains with the company after it is taken over by Santander, according to documents released to shareholders yesterday.

Meanwhile, the bank's 7,500 workers will each receive more than £900 of shares in Santander, the Spanish bank that is buying A&L for £1.3billion, when the deal is completed.

Yesterday A&L sent almost 300 pages of information on the takeover to its 564,000 shareholders. Investors have until an extraordinary meeting on September 16 to decide whether to approve the acquisition.

Under the terms of the offer announced in July, shareholders will receive one share in Santander in return for every three A&L shares. If the takeover is approved, A&L will disappear from the London Stock Exchange on October 10 and will exist in Britain as a subsidiary of Santander, the world's seventh-largest bank.

The documentation revealed that the Spanish bank will offer A&L's top four executives, including David Bennett, the chief executive, and Chris Rhodes, the finance director, a bonus of between 75 per cent and 125 per cent of their salaries to stay with the company until the end of November next year.

If they are laid off before then, they will receive a pro-rata bonus based on the number of months served. Mr Bennett, who has been in his job for slightly more than 12 months, will be paid a base salary of £600,000 this year. He also has A&L shares valued at more than £182,000 by Santander's 299p-a-share offer.

On completion of the deal, the bank's staff will be given 100 San-tander shares each. At yesterday's share price, such a stake was worth £914. A&L workers were also given some comfort from an announcement yesterday, in which the Spanish bank reiterated that it would do its best to avoid compulsory redundancy.

It has said previously that it would save £180million a year by the end of 2011 by combining the two banks' back- office functions.

The acquisition is being done under a scheme of arrangement - a legal agreement that requires 75 per cent of all voting shareholders to vote in favour of the deal.

Shareholders who want to vote by post must register their decision by September 14, but others can vote at the extraordinary meeting in Birmingham on September 16. The deal is scheduled to complete by October 10.

Santander's shares are traded on the London Stock Exchange and dividends to UK shareholders will be paid in sterling, but owning and selling the shares will mean that investors must also comply with Spanish tax rules, including filling out extra paperwork.

Roy Brown, the acting A&L chairman, strongly encouraged shareholders to vote for the deal to ensure that all legal requirements are met for the scheme of arrangement to go through.

Santander is one of Britain's most popular stocks, with retail shareholders, having collected 1.2million mom-and-pop investors when it bought Abbey four years ago. Over the past year it has outperformed the main British high street banks, other than HSBC.

A&L received a boost yesterday when it raised £400million from the sale of bonds backed by prime mortgages, only the second such sale in more than a year. A&L said: “It reflects well on the quality of our underlying mortgage assets.”

Investors have avoided residential mortgage-backed assets after being burnt by US sub-prime investments. However, A&L has no self-certified loans on its books and only 2 percent of its mortgages are buy-to-let, which were not included in the bonds.

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