Jim Cameron shared in a £49,000 pay-off when he left the post of Loganair chief executive earlier this year.

Jim Cameron shared in a £49,000 pay-off when he left the post of Loganair chief executive earlier this year.

Accounts obtained by The Herald from Companies House show that the company, whose main activity is running routes between Glasgow and Edinburgh and Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles, had a bumper year, with pre-tax profits up 60% to £3.5m in the 12 months to the end of March 2007.

Loganair will not name the recipients of the pay-off, but The Herald understands that one of them is Cameron, who is now chief executive of Plymouth-based Air Southwest.

He was replaced by Peter Tierney, who had ran Vector Aerospace in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

"We made a lot of changes during the course of that year," Loganair chairman Scott Grier said. "We are very pleased about the results. We made a lot of changes to the structure of the company to ensure that everyone was working towards better punctuality and efficiency."

During the year, the company bought several aircraft it had previously leased, which was a key driver of profits.

The highest-paid director, thought to be Grier, received pay of £116,000. As a 70% shareholder he also picked up £140,000 after the company paid £210,000 in dividends, more than double that of the year before.

The company's structure is up for discussion. Grier expects to announce "within weeks" whether it is going to go it alone or will hook up with another partner after its franchise agreement with BA ends in a year's time.