Lord Browne of Madingley, the chief executive of BP and one of Britain’s most admired businessmen, has been rewarded for a year of record profits at the oil giant with a £5.65 million pay package - equivalent to more than £15,000 a day.

Lord Browne, who came 77th in The Times’ Power 100 list of the most influential executives in the UK, picked up £3.7 million in pay and bonuses in 2004 when the rising cost of crude oil sent BP’s profits rocketing to £8.7 billion.

He also benefited from share options worth £1.9 million after BP performed well against four of its biggest rivals, including Shell, which saw its share price plunge.

But despite Lord Browne being a popular boss among BP’s 120,000 employees, his bumper pay package was not embraced with great enthusiasm at the company’s London headquarters.

One employee who spoke to Times Online explained that this year’s bonus pool for the majority of Lord Browne's staff had been "restructured" so that higher-grade employees would receive a larger percentage of the pool at the expense of lower grade workers.

"We have been told that our share of the bonus pool will go down but we are not sure by how much. Everyone here was pretty unhappy at the decision - especially as the company is doing so well at the moment.

"Most people don’t mind Lord Browne getting a huge salary as long as everyone else gets remunerated in a fair way."

While Lord Browne’s pay package may be large by any measure, it is dwarfed by the financial payouts received by some of the UK’s other top executives.

Last October the Indian-born steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal reportedly awarded himself a bonus worth £1.1 billion. The one-off dividend payment announced as part of plans to merge his two companies, Ispat International and LNM Holdings, made the entrepreneur the country’s best-paid executive.

Philip Green, the retail tycoon, received a £460 million payday late last year after clearing his borrowings on fashion empire Arcadia. The businessman and his family have a 92 per cent stake in the Top Shop-to-Burtons group and so picked up the lion’s share of a £500 million dividend awarded to shareholders.

The sums received by entrepreneurs like Mr Green and Mr Mittal far outweigh the money awarded to executives of public companies whose salaries and bonuses have increasingly been held in check by complaints from shareholders.

The multi-million pound pay deal of Jean-Pierre Garnier, the chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, in 2004 provoked an investor rebellion and government calls for a change in the "fat cat" rewards culture among top executives.

Most of the major companies have yet to release figures for last year but during 2003, Sir Chris Gent was the best-rewarded chief executive with a total pay package of £10.9 million for his work at the helm of mobile phone group Vodafone.

Lord Browne, who is a Cambridge physics graduate, joined BP in 1966 and apart from three years spent at Standard Oil in the late 1980s, has worked his entire career at the oil giant.

As head of exploration and production in the early 1990s, he looked for oil in new provinces to rebuild BP’s reserves after it had been forced to shrink in the wake of the government share sales of 1987.

As chief executive in 1995 he took advantage of low oil prices to lead the consolidation of the industry through mergers. He symbolically changed British Petroleum into BP, a global company with bigger interests in America than Europe.

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