When TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs’ private equity arm sold Alltel, the US mobile phone operator, to Verizon for $28bn in June, they stood to make a $1.3bn profit on shares they owned for just seven months.

But a lesser-known aspect of the sale is that TPG is set to make an even quicker profit on its share of Alltel’s debt, bought only months earlier from the banks that financed the initial leveraged buy-out of the mobile phone operator. After buying the debt at a discount of about 10 per cent, Verizon will repay TPG at close to full value.