In their scramble to take advantage of strong equities markets, private equity firms have this year carried out record values of flotations and debt issuance in Europe, despite a poor performance by some of the newly listed companies.

Initial public offerings priced from January 1 to June 26 were worth $26.5 billion. This was up from $5.7 billion in the same period last year and 123% higher than the same period in 2007, which at $11.9 billion was the previous record since Dealogic started recording the data in 1995.