AT least five top partners at private-equity giant CVC Capital Partners have received record-breaking payouts of £50m each.

The disclosure of the payments will fuel the political furore over the large sums being earned by individuals at the top of the venture capital industry.

The row forced Alistair Darling, the chancellor, to announce radical changes to the capital-gains tax regime in his prebudget report last week.

These will see private-equity groups pay 80% more tax on the huge sums that they earn from their personal stakes in the investment funds they administer, stakes known within the buyout industry as “carried interest”.

It is understood the five would be liable to pay tax at the current, lower rate of 10% on their payouts, rather than the new rate of 18%.

Last week the City buzzed with speculation over a £250m payout to top executives at CVC, which has in recent years invested in such household names as the AA, Debenhams, Kwik-Fit, Halfords and IG Index, the spread-betting chain.

It is thought that the total payout, once other staff are included, could stretch to more than £300m.

The recipients are believed to include Michael Smith, 54, the group’s Leeds-born chairman, as well as Donald Mackenzie, its senior London partner.

The identity of the other recipients is unclear, but industry observers speculated they may include Rob Lucas and Jonathan Feuer, two London partners in their forties and the San Francisco-born Hardy McLain, a co-founder of CVC.

The windfall was paid after CVC group’s third European fund generated impressive annual net returns of more than 40% after fees.

Lucrative deals include a £350m gain from the sale of Kwik-Fit, a UK tyre and exhaust fitter, which was sold to fellow private-equity group PAI for £800m. Other deals included the purchase and sale of IG Index and Halfords, the car-parts retailer.

CVC led a consortium of buyout groups that earlier this year failed in an attempt to buy J Sainsbury, the supermarket chain.

It is regarded as one of the few UK-based private-equity groups, along with Permira, with the ambition to challenge the large American buyout groups on the world stage.

In recent months it has made a big push into Asia, which it sees as the new growth area for its business.

The collapse of the bid was seen by some commentators as the high-water mark of private equity’s ambitions in the UK.

Sainsbury is now the subject of a takeover approach from a group of investors that are backed by the Qatar government.

In an interview with Financial News in 2005, Smith said that when CVC was raising its third fund in 2001, many investors assumed that returns were on their way down.

“The increased competition in private equity and the low underlying growth of corporate stocks meant it was entirely reasonable for investors to expect returns to fall, especially in the large buyout space.

“However, it is quite interesting that this was not the case. “The actual outcome, as demonstrated by our third fund’s portfolio, has been that the large buyout space has outper-formed even more strongly than in the previous cycle, particularly with respect to Europe,” said Smith.

CVC is one of the top five private-equity firms in the world. Its funds own 44 companies that have revenues in excess of €38.5 billion (£26.8 billion) and 309,000 employees worldwide.

It manages equity capital of €20.9 billion.

CVC was founded in 1981 and spun out of Citicorp in 1993.

The firm has completed more than 250 investments across a wide range of industries and countries.

In Britain it has been involved in a number of controversial deals – notably Debenhams – which it took private together with Texas Pacific, Merrill Lynch and its management, and then refloated on the stock market just over two years later at a huge profit. The shares have since performed badly and remain below their float price.

CVC also has a stake in the AA, which has been the target of a union campaign all summer over cuts to its workforce.

Unions have also led a wider campaign against private-equity, arguing that top executives were paying too little tax on their earnings.

Buy-out executives normally take most of their remuneration from gains in the size of their funds, on which they pay capital gains tax rather than higher rates of income tax.

MPs on the Treasury select committee grilled industry leaders in a series of confrontational meetings on the issue earlier this year.

CVC refused to comment.

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