The company, which has over 800 pubs across Britain, said pretax profit before exceptional items for the year to July 29 was 72.4 million pounds, compared to 66.8 million pounds in 2011 and ahead of an average forecast of 69.12 million according to Reuters poll of 16 analysts.

Increased food and bar sales pushed revenue in the period up 9.3 percent to almost 1.2 billion pounds, with like for like sales up 3.2 percent. Including a 53rd week, pretax profit grew by 8.4 percent.

The chain, which opened its first Wetherspoon pub in 1979, said underlying sales in the six weeks to September 9 had risen 8.4 percent after a strong performance during the London Olympic and Paralympic Games, although it did not expect to sustain that level of growth.

Wetherspoon (JDW.L) has been one of the better performing pub firms throughout the economic downturn because of its value-for-money offers but it remains a staunch critic of the government's taxation rules which it says favours supermarkets over pubs.

"The pub industry has been fleeced by the government, in the last decade and a half," Chairman Tim Martin said, who will open 25 pubs in the new year to July.

"Pubs pay 20 percent VAT in respect of food sales, while supermarkets pay virtually nothing. This enables supermarkets to cross-subsidise their alcoholic drinks' prices, resulting in large numbers of pub closures and also applying enormous pressure to those pubs which remain open."

Shares in the FTSE 250 firm, which said it expected a "reasonable outcome" for the 2012/13 financial year, closed at 460.6 pence on Thursday, up 19 percent on a year ago, valuing the business at around 586 million pounds.

(Reporting by Neil Maidment; Editing by Rhys Jones)

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