As I understood it, Mitt Romney left his job at Bain Capital in February 1999 in order to take over the planning and management of the 2002 Winter Olympics that were to take place in Utah. He made a big deal about not accepting any salary for his efforts. And he used the success of the Winter Olympics as a springboard to launch his political career in Massachusetts, winning the governorship that same fall. It’s a nice story, but it isn’t entirely true.
While the truth isn’t entirely clear, Romney didn’t actually resign from Bain Capital. He remained the “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president” until 2002. The Boston Globe has unearthed numerous documents that prove this. In addition, they discovered that Mitt Romney testified before the Massachusetts Ballot Law Commission in 2002 that he had merely taken a leave of absence from Bain Capital.
During the four years in question, Romney received a salary of $100,000 in addition to all his investment income from Bain.
Why does any of this matter? Because Romney has been defending himself against layoffs Bain Capital made in the 1999-2002 period by saying that he had left the company and had no responsibility for those decisions. He made that argument in the governor’s race in 2002, in his presidential bid in 2008, and during the current contest in 2011-12. But, at best, he was taking a paid leave of absence.
Moreover, throughout that entire period of time, Bain Capital was making representations that Romney was still their CEO, which could constitute fraud if investors were misled into thinking that Romney would be handling their money.
So, on the one hand, maybe Romney has been lying about having no control of Bain’s decisions in 1999-2002. On the other hand, maybe he and Bain were defrauding investors during that time period. Which is it?
Even if we believe Romney, it must be nice to get paid a hundred grand a year to do nothing. But who would believe that Romney would exercise no control over a company for four years while remaining the sole stockholder?
Anyone?
The better question is if he’ll suffer anything for this. Given the times we live in, he won’t.
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Kinda beat you to this news story and link to Boston Globe, see my new diary – Romney Can’t Help It – His Faith and Social Darwinism.
Another interesting part is – Romney’s Success Story for 2002 Olympics: Lobbying for Taxpayer Money plus video.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I suppose if $350K for giving speeches last year isn’t a lot of money, than $100K would be completely negligible, barely sufficient to pay for Ann’s horses. No wonder he maintains that he wasn’t working for Bain while being paid such a pittance!
$100,000 is basically a retainer. For Mitt it’s not serious money like bankrupting or offshoring. But it allows him a safety backup in case politicking doesn’t work out and he wants to get back in the swim of big money. Nice for him. As it turned out, he didn’t need to go back and still pulls in seven figures a year from his globally significant pile of money.
Walking aroound money for a guy like Romney.
Or maybe, it’s just exactly what it appears to be, and he deferred day-to-day management of the investment portfolio while retaining a token position with the company so he could keep a free paycheck. Why hand over the company to an official new CEO until his political aspirations had been settled one way or the other?
Instead of being an excitable twit about fraud or whatever, might it just be easier to just take note of Romney’s repeated history of corporate freeloading instead? Since we’re on the subject of people taking “free stuff” at the expense of others and all.
From the article:
Tremendous. Let’s go find some of these hypothetical wronged investors that surely exist and get a class-action lawsuit going…
Be real. Besides, it doesn’t even matter who was running what, when. If all you want to do is link Bain to outsourcing, you can do so even before 1999, thus eliminating any inconsistencies.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/bain-capital-mitt-romney-outsourcing-china-global-tech
Bain got in early on Chinese manufacturing. Full stop. Good business for them then, bad business for Romney now. There’s your story.
I’d love to see a class action suit from wealthy Obama-supporting investors in Bain.
That’s high-grade stuff.
And who put you in charge of messaging?
That’s Romney is a liar and a fraud is at least as important as his record of outsourcing jobs.
He maintained sole ownership and legal control of Bain, of course he’s fucking responsible for its business dealings from ’99-02. I don’t see how anyone could dispute that. I can’t believe the press bought that for a full decade-plus.
So he lied to outsiders in Massachusetts and now nationwide about his knowledge of Bain’s portfolio. If it started losing money, you can be damn sure he’d have got his ass back to Boston to fix that right quick. He never stopped looking out for number one. He never divested or cashed out.
But who on the inside is he supposed to have defrauded?
I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t precisely answer your question.
But I think the basic idea is pretty obvious. You have these hedge funds and venture capital funds that are run by rock stars who have a reputation for being brilliant and vastly outperforming the market indexes. And, so, potential investors flock to those folks and the funds they manage. And if Bain was putting it out there that superstar Mitt Romney was managing their funds for four years when he actually wasn’t doing shit, then that could constitute fraud.
Hell, I remember when season ticket-holders sued the Florida Marlins after they won the World Series and sold a lot of new seats only to turn around and sell-off all their talent. It’s the same principle.
Now, how exactly that works legally has to do with both the specific forms that were filled out with the SEC, promotional materials that were produced by Bain at the time, and even norms about what is enforced and prosecuted, because we all know that plenty of illegal stuff just slides by the enforcement agencies.
Be real? So you are saying a former SEC commish is full o’ crap? His name isn’t Harvey Pitt, so I’d have to give him the benefit of the doubt, unless proved otherwise.
The $100,000 sounds like compensation (cause it wasn’t a gift!) that may come home to haunt him. It also sounds like a rich man’s version of ‘free stuff’ he was deriding the NAACP crowd about.
I heard that Am Crossroads has caught the attention of the IRS. Bout time. I’ve been chilling that bottle of Karl Rove champagn to toast for the orange jumpsuit moment since Fitz went after him.
Perhaps the IRS could take a hint from the brazzen Mr. Rove’s actions and bookmark them with Romney’s brazen abuse of our tax system.
OT, have you seen the Penn State report? It’s devastating. We need one just like it about the Catholic Church as high up as the pope.
You’ve already got it.
Pope Bendict (yeah, the grody old guy in the funny hat currently serving as pope) was the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the Inquisition) from 1981 to 2005.
According to Article 48 of the Apostolic Constitution on the Roman Curia, Pastor Bonus, promulgated by Pope John Paul II on June 28, 1988: “The proper duty of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is to promote and safeguard the doctrine on faith and morals in the whole Catholic world; so it has competence in things that touch this matter in any way.” That, by the way, includes naughty priests. Thus, this pope was in charge of directing the investigations of priests on the charge of pedophilia. It can probably be safely assumed that he failed.
For his failure, he was punished by being made Pope.
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Romneyville — mighty Mittens has struck out.
[yes, corny, but in the US there’s no such thing as too much corn]
Somewhere in this favored land there are secretaries who took messages and there are phone records of communications and travel records and expense accounts. Behavior is truth. Let the chase begin. And drivers and all the little people that make it possible for the big people to be big.
And somewhere in this favored land there are factually false declarations made under oath. But in the US only the little people need fear the law of perjury. But MIttens isn’t really “lying” in the sense of a knowing untruth. Sociopaths and psychopaths know no truths. It’s rather like W. If I say it it must be true. An empire makes its own truths. Read Robert Hare