The Wall Street bank JP Morgan Chase has reignited a political furore over City pay packets by disclosing that it will hand out $9.3bn (£5.73bn) to its investment banking staff around the world despite facing a likely hit of "several hundred million dollars" from Britain's special tax on bankers' bonuses.

JP Morgan's 24,654 investment bankers, including nearly 5,000 employees in London, will get an average of $379,000 each after the financial services group surfed a wave of recovery in global markets to notch up year-end profits of $11.7bn, more than double its earnings of $5.6bn during crisis-stricken 2008.

The bank's bonuses are lower than analysts had anticipated. In an apparent response to political and public concern, JP Morgan is shifting some of its payouts from cash into shares. In the final quarter of the year, the proportion of revenue allocated to remuneration fell from a typical figure of 40% to just 11%. JP Morgan's finance director said the compensation total was reduced by a need to "offset British tax on bonuses" - the first admission that banks are responding to Alistair Darling's bonus tax.

But JP Morgan's payout still attracted swift condemnation. Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, renewed calls for a global tax on financial transactions and said: "These obscene bonuses paid so soon after the world's taxpayers had to rescue the banking system show that there is something fundamentally wrong in the relationship between banking and the rest of society."

Depressed by ongoing losses on bad loans made by its recession-battered high street banking chain in the US, JP Morgan's profits were at the low end of Wall Street forecasts. Chief executive Jamie Dimon admitted he was disappointed with the firm's rate of recovery: "Though these results showed improvement, we acknowledge that they fell short of both an adequate return on capital and the firm's earnings potential."

The numbers were revealed just 24 hours after president Barack Obama attacked banks for reverting to "risky bets" for quick rewards and set out plans for a levy on financial institutions to recoup US taxpayers' money spent on bailouts.

Striking a defiant tone, JP Morgan's chief executive, Jamie Dimon, criticised the White House for singling out banks: "We generally agree with the concept that the industry should pay for its own clean-up. But the Tarp [bailout] got extended to a lot of things beyond banks - insurance companies, car companies - and I don't understand why we should pay for that."

Dimon's overtures to Darling

In Britain, chancellor Alistair Darling intends to impose a 50% supertax on bankers' bonuses of more than £25,000 per person. Dimon has made representations over the tax to Darling, pointing out to the chancellor that JP Morgan is a major investor in London and received no state aid from British taxpayers. JP Morgan is due to decide later this year whether to press ahead with a planned new £1.5bn European headquarters office block at Canary Wharf and the tax is expected to be a factor in this decision.

Speaking on a conference call with analysts, Dimon said he expected Britain's tax to cost "several hundred million dollars" although the precise figure will depend on the detailed wording of legislation that will determine exactly how many of JP Morgan's staff will be affected. The bank intends to share the impact of the tax, bearing part of the cost itself and passing on part of it to its individual bankers.

Considered one of America's most financially robust banks, JP Morgan's sprawling financial services empire employs a total of 222,000 people globally and topped $100bn in revenue last year. The firm was one of the few Wall Street institutions to emerge from the financial crisis in a healthy state - it never reported a quarterly loss and it bought the remnants of two victims of the credit crunch, Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. Although JP Morgan received $25bn in bailout funds from the US Treasury, it was among the first to repay the money, returning it in June.

The collapse of weaker players, together with a vigorous stock market recovery, has turned surviving banks' trading floors more lucrative than ever. But the spectre of bankers pocketing near record bonuses has infuriated members of the public who are still experiencing rising unemployment, failures in the high street and severe austerity.

Another US bank, Citigroup, reportedly intends to cap cash bonuses at $100,000, with any additional rewards in shares maturing over a period of years.

"People looking at it from the outside look at the dollars and say they are high," said Kenneth Raskin, the head of law firm White & Case's executive compensation practice in New York. "There is no question the dollars are high. The question is whether they were deserving."