Around 600 employees of Whyte & Mackay whisky company are enjoying a remarkable windfall after their outgoing chief paid them a bonus equivalent to three months' salary from his own pocket.

Vivian Imerman, the South African entrepreneur who became chief executive and majority shareholder of Whyte & Mackay in 2005, sold the company for £595m on Wednesday to India's UB Group. He said he was paying £26m in bonuses to all his staff to reward them for their role in transforming the company's fortunes.

"Clearly it has been a team effort by all the people involved, not just senior management," Mr Imerman told The Herald yesterday.

"The 20 or so people at the top have been handsomely rewarded but I wanted to reward everybody. I therefore felt it appropriate, on a discretionary basis, to give every single employee this bonus. It is effectively a 25% bonus which is worth around £26m in total."

Mr Imerman, 52, has built a reputation for buying companies and turning them around. His most celebrated deal until Wednesday was the £380m sale of the Del Monte canned fruit empire in 2001.

It is not the first time the tycoon has given generous rewards to his staff. He said yesterday: "I buy companies and turn them around all over the world. Whenever I do a deal that does well I always do this. I have done this for at least 10 companies before although they are of varying sizes - they are not all as big as this."

Employees across Scotland were told of the decision on Wednesday as the long-awaited buyout by UB Group, the world's third-largest maker of spirits, went through.

Most of Whyte & Mackay's 600 workforce are employed at the Invergordon grain distillery and Grangemouth bottling plant but there are also sales and marketing staff employed in Glasgow and several employed at the company's four malt distilleries.

There was understandable jubilation among staff yesterday. Stewart Lawrie, UK managing director, said workers were "thrilled". He said: "When Vivian Imerman took over, this business was dead. He completely turned it around and we are really thrilled."

John Donnelly, director of manufacturing, added: "Everybody is so delighted with their bonuses - if there was a vote for the king of Scotland it would most probably be Vivian Imerman."

Vijay Mallya, chairman and chief executive of UB, dubbed "India's Richard Branson", gave assurances on Wednesday that jobs at Whyte & Mackay would not be threatened by the buyout. He said that Mr Imerman would remain with the group as "strategy advisor".

The South African and his brother-in-law, Robert Tchenguiz, were part of a group of investors who paid £208m for Whyte & Mackay in 2001 then took full control two years ago. He initially presided over job cuts at the company while centralising the bottling operation at Grangemouth and closing premises at Leith.

But Mr Imerman claimed credit yesterday in reversing the fortunes of Whyte & Mackay and, more broadly, the Scottish whisky industry.

"I think when I came into the business there was a lot of negative press about this South African who didn't know what he was doing in Scotland, didn't know what he was doing with the Scottish whisky industry. People were less than confident that I knew what I was doing," he said.

"During the course of my tenure with the company had to make some difficult decisions. I let certain managers go. I fired a lot of directors of staff.

"In my opinion, I needed to bring in people who bought into my vision and were used to to the way I'm working in a multinational business."