Department heads from JPMorgan Chase yesterday began redundancy talks with their counterparts at Bear Stearns after securing a rescue deal late on Sunday evening to buy the bank for 6 per cent of its value last week.

While JPMorgan Chase refused to comment yesterday, it is thought that the American bank may be considering making half of the 14,000 Bear staff redundant.

JPMorgan Chase is expecting the deal to cost $6 billion (£3 billion) in expenses, from severance and retention to waves of litigation and asset writedowns. That comes after $30 billion of Bear’s bonds were underwritten by the US Federal Reserve.

Shares in Bear Stearns, which was acquired by JPMorgan Chase for about $240 million — representing a 94 per cent discount to Friday’s closing price, collapsed 84 per cent to $4.81, still above the $2 per share offer price. The deal was unanimously recommended by the Bear board but still requires shareholder approval.

Redundancy talks began as it emerged that JPMorgan Chase has not invested a single cent in its all share purchase of Bear. Yesterday, it became clear that the credit line, of an undisclosed sum, offered by JPMorgan Chase to Bear on Thursday night to keep the struggling bank afloat, used rescue funds which had been provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Jim Rogers, who co-founded the Quantum Hedge Fund with George Soros in the 1970s, said: “Jamie Dimon has done a great deal because the Federal Reserve is paying for it.”

Yesterday, executives who run JPMorgan Chase’s divisions such as investment banking and fixed income, walked over 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan to their neighbour Bear Stearns and began talks about integration.

Significant redundancies are expected at Bear Stearns, which on Thursday evening, effectively experienced a run on deposits by its customers and counterparts, fearing that one of the world’s largest custodians was about to go bust.

It is understood that JPMorgan Chase wants to keep Bear’s prime brokerage, global clearing platform, equities and energy trading businesses. However, there is significant overlap between Bear and JPMorgan Chase’s fixed income and investment banking divisions — which form the bulk of Bear’s business.

It is not clear whether JPMorgan Chase is seeking to sell the Bear Stearns tower, the bank’s global headquarters, on Madison Avenue, prime Manhattan real estate.

As the integration process was initiated it emerged that Bear Stearns shareholders began to contact lawyers with a view to exploring whether they can sue the company for selling itself at a rock bottom price.

Ira Press, a lawyer at Kirby McInerney, who spoke to angry Bear investors yesterday, said: “I can’t divulge privileged conversations, but shareholders don’t contact me when they are happy with the way things are going with their investments. This is a stock that has gone from 50 to 2 literally overnight, and I also know of people who had assumed that the worst had passed when it closed at 30.”

Jeffrey Nobel, a partner at Schatz Nobel Izard, said: “We’ve been contacted by large individual investors and institutional investors. Suffice to say, we are certainly looking very carefully at it.” Legal experts said that shareholders might sue Bear and its executives for securities fraud, contending that they had failed to disclose the company’s true financial health.

Last night it was reported that Joe Lewis, the billionaire investor, was trying to block JPMorgan Chase’s takeover of Bear in an effort to avert a £500 million personal loss. Mr Lewis’s Tavistock Group holds a 9.4 per cent stake in the stricken bank.

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