THE private-equity firm best known for having invested in Yates’s, the bar chain, is in talks to buy Park Resorts, one of the UK’s largest operators of caravan parks, for up to £500m.

GI Partners, which has head offices in both London and California, is understood to be negotiating exclusively to buy the company from its majority shareholder, ABN Amro Capital, the private-equity arm of the Dutch bank.

ABN has owned the business for a relatively short time. It bought into the sector in November 2004 with the purchase of GB Holidays and followed it up a month later with a £165m deal to buy Park Resorts. The two companies were merged and the enlarged group kept the Park Resorts name.

It operates 35 parks across the UK and makes profits of about £30m. Although ABN Amro is its largest shareholder, another significant investor is Close Brothers Private Equity. GI is said to want to back the company’s management, which also owns a stake in the business.

GI Partners is thought to have been tracking Park Resorts for some time, and is known to be keen on the leisure sector.

In 2004, it led a deal to take Yates’s off the stock market before selling the business less than a year later to Laurel Pub Company.

Its other investments include Orchid Pub Company, owner of about 300 pubs previously controlled by Punch Taverns, and Cambian Healthcare, which runs psychiatric health centres.

Both GI and ABN Amro declined to comment.