The Bank of Scotland was last night still in talks with the controversial TV evangelist Pat Robertson, and was expected overnight to announce its withdrawal from a major tele-banking deal after a storm of protest in its home market.

Mr Peter Burt, chief executive of the small but profitable retail bank, was with other senior figures in Virginia, exercising a getout clause in the contract they struck last February with the former far-right candidate for the US presidency.

The 304-year-old Edinburgh institution has been badly stung by criticism of its link with Robertson and his Christian Broadcast Network, through which it had hoped to target a potential market of more than 50 million American viewers, never having had a presence in the US market before.

Critics had pounced on past statements by the evangelist, who had denounced gays, feminists and non-Christians. Those urging that the bank break its link included leading figures in all the mainstream churches. Robertson has claimed that homosexuality and satanism seemed to go together and that gay people wanted to destroy Christians. Muslims and Hindus were deemed unsuited to jobs in government.

Feminism, Robertson once claimed, is a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practise witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

The bank had sought to ride out the storm earlier this year, but the embarrassing link erupted again with reports earlier this week that Robertson had denounced Scotland itself as a kind of frightening country which could go back to the darkness very easily.

Speaking on his 33-year-old cable programme, he denounced the country as being too tolerant, a place where you could not believe how strong homosexuals were. The bank was coming under growing commercial pressure. More than 500 private accounts have been withdrawn, but the threat was of a far greater backlash as institutions protested. The UK Trades Union Congress, whose members have more than 100,000 affinity credit cards managed through the Bank of Scotland, was threatening to shift its business. Major charities and local authorities were doing likewise, and the prestigious account of the new Scottish Parliament was in question as its members voiced their concerns.