WHEN her son Damon was still a little boy 30 years ago, Maureen Buffini moved her family from a decrepit council flat at 38 Somers Road into a two-up, two-down near the Victoria Park campus of Leicester University.

She took a steady job in Leicester’s Grand Hotel, the residence of choice for travelling businessmen, and focused her talents and energies on her son and moving him up in the world.

Damon got into Gateway, a Leicester boys’ grammar school specialising in engineering and industrial drawing. He did well and the school did too. Under the Labour government of James Callaghan, Gateway adopted a more academic curriculum and started a sixth-form college.

Damon’s father was a black American serviceman who was never part of the family. This made the boy stand out, said Steve Martin, his economics tutor. But it did nothing to hold him back. “Damon was a popular boy,” said Martin, who is now Gateway’s deputy head. “He was an excellent athlete — very quick.”

Buffini shone in the classroom as well as on the sports field. “He was the kind of character who would spark things off,” said Martin. “What’s this Keynesian theory stuff? It doesn’t work (he would say). He was always ready to test things out.”

He got As in A-level English and history and an A-star in economics, and his mum was there to see that he did. Maureen Buffini was a tall, elegant woman in striking clothes, Martin recalled. “If we said Damon was doing well, she would ask how he could do better,” he said.

Martin took Gateway’s football team to play Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. “The boys saw what they could aspire to,” he said.

A quarter-century on, Damon Buffini, now 43, is managing partner of Permira, the London-based private-equity firm that buys companies such as Homebase and the Automobile Association with cash and borrowed funds, changes the way they do business and then sells them on at a profit.

Under his leadership Permira has established itself as a leader among the 4,000 private-equity firms worldwide. Alongside Apax and CVC, it is one of London’s Big Three.

As one of perhaps 100 men who most influence how capital gets allocated in the City, Buffini vies with Britain’s ambassador to South Africa — Paul Boateng, the former Labour MP — for the position of Britain’s most powerful black man.

He is also the future of the City rich list. His net worth today is estimated at £18m, based on average annual earnings over the past four years of £3.5m, plus his share of the 20% cut Permira has taken on some $300m (£173m) in profits distributed to investors since 1991.

In three or four years when future bonuses kick in, peers say, he will cross the £40m threshold necessary to make the list, and rise from there.

Commuting from his home off London’s Wandsworth Common, which he shares with his ethnic Chinese solicitor wife, Deborah, jetting to America for golf between meetings with investors, running a restaurant business on the side with his wife and sister, Tara, he also illustrates the paradox of what it takes to become a City figure.