The multimillionaire Republican presidential candidate has battled to control the narrative of his time running Bain Capital, the private equity juggernaut he led until 1999 or, as it turns out, probably later. Bain invested in some companies to make money by saving them. It invested in others to make money by shuttering them. Romney says he isn’t responsible for any bankruptcies and layoffs the company might have orchestrated after he left. Filings with the SEC say he headed the company until 2002, not 1999, as he maintains. Romney either lied on the stump or to the SEC.
There’s more bad news for Romney from the SEC today.
Filings unearthed and reported on today by David Corn counter another Romney stump assertion about his time at Bain. The candidate says he didn’t make money from or otherwise abet the outsourcing industry that drained the US of jobs over the last two decades. Yet he did, according to the documents, not just through Bain but through accounts of a corporation based in Bermuda that he controlled entirely.
Under Romney’s leadership, Bain invested in Hong Kong-based Global Tech Appliances, which sought to capitalize specifically on outsourcing by relocating US manufacturing and assembling jobs to Asia, where labor and materials are cheaper.
An SEC filing submitted on December 21, 1998, reported that the Bain affiliate [Brookside Capital] now controlled only 4.63 percent of the company’s shares [in Global Tech]. But Brookside was sharing its stake in Global-Tech with Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors LTD- a Bermuda-based corporation of which Romney was the “the sole shareholder, a director, and President.” That is, Romney had split his Global-Tech holdings between two of his various business entities. (The SEC filing doesn’t indicate why he did that.)
Sankaty is a story in itself. It was recently the focus of an Associated Press investigation that reported that Sankaty “is among several Romney holdings that have not been fully disclosed” and that there is a “mystery surrounding” Sankaty. Reporting on this Romney entity, Vanity Fair noted that “investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in ‘jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,’ as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it.” With Sankaty, Romney was using a mysterious Bermuda-based entity to invest in a Chinese firm that thrived on US outsourcing.
That sounds like a good way to make money. It doesn’t the least bit sound like the work of a person who wants to champion American workers of the middle class.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
BY: harrydoby
IN: Tuesday Open Thread
BY: DavidThi808
IN: Tuesday Open Thread
BY: 2Jung2Die
IN: Tuesday Open Thread
BY: Duke Cox
IN: Tuesday Open Thread
BY: JohnNorthofDenver
IN: Tuesday Open Thread
BY: Duke Cox
IN: Weekend Open Thread
BY: Lauren Boebert is a Worthless POS
IN: Weekend Open Thread
BY: Bill Carson
IN: Veterans Day 2024 Open Thread
BY: harrydoby
IN: Veterans Day 2024 Open Thread
BY: Bill Carson
IN: Veterans Day 2024 Open Thread
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to stay in the loop with regular updates!
couldn’t happen to a better guy. Someone else here today mentioned a McInnis level of dishonesty and I tend to agree…
All of it makes you think twice about the fact that he’s not even the nominee yet. A sane party would get rid of him… except that the GOP is not a sane party and so they have no sane candidates to replace him with. I guess it’s Ron Paul!
As PorMeCoffee tweeted today: “A thousand philosophers meditating 24 hours a day could not fully appreciate the irony of the Tea Party revolution leading to Mitt Romney.”
After all, none of them have actually “quit.” They all just “suspended” their campaigns.
Now, wouldn’t THAT be a stitch? If Romney were to actually have to quit the race at this point, it would be the biggest game-changer ever. Probably the House and Senate would both go solid Democratic.
back to save the day. Or maybe Governor Huntsman. The other one.
but it would sure be dramatic to watch the GOP changing the rules and nominating Jeb Bush. Unfortunately, he would probably win.
Yes, it could happen, they are Rethuglicans