Andy Hornby towered over his bank's annual shareholder meeting in Glasgow yesterday — quite literally.

The faces of the HBOS chief executive and Mike Ellis, finance director, appeared on a giant screen above their fellow directors, beamed to the meeting from a broadcasting suite in London where they had spent the morning explaining the bank's £4 billion rights issue to institutional investors in the City.

"They should be here," yelled one furious shareholder to a round of applause.

Another day, another bank, another apology. "Let me immediately begin by apologising for not being with you in person," said Mr Hornby via the video link. It was, conceded Lord Stevenson of Coddenham, HBOS's chairman, "by any standards an unusual AGM".

Just hours after confirming that it was following Royal Bank of Scotland by asking shareholders for funds, there was a muted reaction from investors at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre on the banks of the River Clyde.

Clearly relishing the challenge, the charming, wildly gesticulating and terribly well-spoken Lord Stevenson was at his smooth and emollient best. He punched the air when he spoke of the competitive advantage a stronger capital position would bring. He laughed, perhaps a little too loudly, when shareholders cracked jokes at the company's expense. When one private investor referred to the City as "gherkin-land", he enthused: "Thank you for a new expression in my voculabulary."

He thanked everybody for their question, no matter how awkward, and singled out for praise his chief executive, who had, he said, "acted like a bullet out of a gun" to quash false rumours last month about the bank's exposure to bad debts.

The rights issue decision was, he insisted, a question of "good old-fashioned prudence". At a time when banks across the world were announcing substantial "write-orfs", he said that he wanted to go "slightly orf script and share with you my view of what is happening".

Referring to "so-called financial turbulence", he added: "Banks and other institutions are looking at each other nervously not sure how robust each institution is and as a result have become very cautious about lending to each other."

But despite reassuring the packed conference hall that HBOS's exposure to sub-prime mortages in the US was "negligible", the tricky questions kept coming. One investor, William Morrison, told him: "What I look for in a bank manager is prudence, not chasing market share ... Who is responsible for getting HBOS into the sub-prime and other risky mortgages and is he going to resign or be fired?"

Another lamented that the bank was now a "lame duck", while at least one other complained that the rights issue would dilute shareholder value. Anne Edmonds, from Edinburgh, who said that the company's chief executive was sitting in "gherkin-land", railed against "the number of zeroes in the salaries of people sitting on the platform".

Another suggested that HBOS was asking shareholders for money following behind-the-scenes pressure from a Government desperate to keep the housing market afloat. "The decision to do a rights issue has nothing to do with political pressure, it's a decision we believe is right for the company," replied Mr Hornby.

Just about the only praise came from Martin Simons, a shareholder in Bank of Scotland for 25 years. "I would like to congratulate the board on its extremely prompt action when gherkin-land rumoured that we were in debt trouble," he said. Referring to the as yet-unidentified source of the rumours, he added: "I hope every time they eat a boiled egg it will taste addled and every time they take a dram it turns to vinegar."

Nodding in agreement, Lord Stevenson noted recent action taken by authorities against market manipulators in New York. "We don't seem to be able to do that in this country and we've jolly well go to stop bad people doing the modern-day equivalent of bank robbery."

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