Thursday, August 23, 2012

Romney's Bain Documents Released

I've been perusing the info and it's damning. Romney owns (or has had a stake in) practically everything in the universe. He probably could literally buy the White House. Serious conflicts of interest, especially in the Sankaty investment. Mitt is the National Enquirer's banker. Visit Gawker for the files.
Today, we are publishing more than 950 pages of internal audits, financial statements, and private investor letters for 21 cryptically named entities in which Romney had invested—at minimum—more than $10 million as of 2011 (that number is based on the low end of ranges he has disclosed—the true number is almost certainly significantly higher). Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, depending on whom you ask). Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands.

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Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama's fiscal approach and his money managers' embrace of those same policies. They also show that some of the investments that Romney has always described as part of his retirement package at Bain weren't made until years after he left the company. Gawker

Romney owns a stake in Sankaty High Yield Partners II LP, which lent Sheldon Adelson's Las Vegas Sands' $3 million. As you might recall Adelson has already donated at least $20 million to Romney's re-election and has said he'll stop at nothing. Gawker

How Romney really makes his money:
Romney has described his experience at Bain as a hands-on, sleeves-rolled-up exercise in rebuilding companies from the ground up. But to judge by the financial statements of Bain's various funds, he makes his money not from the "launch[ing] or rebuild[ing] of over one hundred companies" but from exotic and highly technical financial instruments that have little or no basis in the real economy that most Americans understand. Gawker