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The call came a week after Prestbury announced a pre-tax loss of £1m for the 14-month period ending 31 December. This was down from nearly £250,000 in profit in the previous trading year.

The statement to the stock market last week said Prestbury had restored trading on Aim after the network had to suspend trading between 27 June and 28 July as it was unable to file its annual results on time.

Prestbury also said notice of an extraordinary general meeting had been sent to shareholders for 20 August to be held after the company's annual general meeting, to consider removal of the executive directors.

The reason given by the shareholders to call on the removal of Mr and Ms Birkett was they had "lost confidence in the corporate governance standards at Prestbury and believe that the company suffers too many conflicts of interest with certain members of the executive team."

The statement revealed Francis Maude, chairman of Prestbury, and David Anderson, non-executive director of Prestbury, had called on the network's board to be restructured so the executive directors no longer formed a majority of the board in order to conform with best corporate governance practice.

However, their proposals were rejected by executive directors Lee Birkett, chief executive, Lynne Birkett, finance director, Maggie Cresswell, compliance director, and Kevin Sample, sales director.

Ms Maude and Mr Anderson said they believed the new board structure would have addressed the concerns held by outside shareholders and Mr Birkett's position as chief executive could have been accommodated within the proposed new board structure.

Prestbury said in a statement last week its poor results had been due in part to a challenging second half of 2007, when the number of new mortgages being completed fell sharply.

It also contributed the loss to a £850,000 loan to packager PIM, which is owned by Mr Birkett.

The statement said: "Since January this year, the effects of the reduced liquidity have flowed fully through to the mainstream lending market.

"Most banks and building societies are currently seeking minimal new net lending and many of these are struggling to finance existing clients' financing needs.

"We reported in our last interims that 65 per cent of our mortgage revenues came from the remortgage activities undertaken by our advisers for their existing clients."