CVC Partners, the British private equity firm, has poached the head of Investcorp’s private equity business in New York to spearhead a planned push into the United States, The Times has learnt.

CVC has hired Chris Stabler, the head of North American Private Equity and a senior managing director at Investcorp, who has been with the firm since 1996. He is due to leave Investcorp in the next few weeks and is expected to have six weeks’ gardening leave before starting with CVC, sources said.

The firm has hired CPI, the New York headhunter, and has been actively in the market looking for partners to run the business as it seeks to tap into the world’s most lucrative buyout market. It is expected to make an announcement on the move soon, the sources said.

At the same time, it has emerged that BC Partners, a rival British firm, is considering a move to New York, although its plans are not as advanced as CVC’s, the sources said.

CVC and BC Partners declined to comment and Mr Stabler could not be reached for comment.

So far, of the large UK firms only Permira and Apax have managed to set up in New York. Others, such as CVC and BC, are keen to follow suit, attracted by the more liberal market for private equity deals and a vast network of banks, lawyers and accountants needed to pull off big deals.

Last year, European private equity firms did $265.4 billion (£134.4 billion) of deals, according to data from Thomson Financial. However, that was dwarfed by American volumes, which soared to $423.5 billion on the back of megadeals such as KKR’s acquisition of HCA and Blackstone’s $36 billion buyout of Equity Office Property.

For British firms such as CVC, Apax and Permira, competing with giants on their home turf is not easy. One senior partner at a British buyout firm in London said: “There are so many buyout firms in the US already, how are we going to make a distinction in that morass?” In the past two years, more than a dozen Apax partners have either resigned or been laid off from the firm’s US division after it changed its strategy to focus more on larger buyouts and less on venture capital investments.

It acquired Saunders Karp & Megrue, a mid-market buyout shop, in 2005, but sources said that the firm’s insistence on doing increasingly large deals has prompted the departure of Allan Karp, co-chief executive, and Chris Reilly and Roger Hurwitz, partners, all of whom left in October. As a result, bankers say that Apax is forced to do most of its work in the US, such as the $1.6 billion buyout of Tommy Hilfiger, using London-based partners.

Larry Slaughter, head of JPMorgan’s Financial Sponsor Group in Europe, which advises private equity firms, said that making it work in America is about getting the right people, but that finding such people is difficult. “The best candidates are working with well-respected firms and they’ve got valuable partnership interest. So to entice them out of other buyout firms is not easy.”

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