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And this is a big deal why?...
http://articles.boston.com/2012-07-1...ial-disclosureGovernment do ents filed by Mitt Romney and Bain Capital say Romney remained chief executive and chairman of the firm three years beyond the date he said he ceded control, even creating five new investment partnerships during that time.
Romney has said he left Bain in 1999 to lead the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, ending his role in the company. But public Securities and Exchange Commission do ents filed later by Bain Capital state he remained the firm’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president.”
Also, a Massachusetts financial disclosure form Romney filed in 2003 states that he still owned 100 percent of Bain Capital in 2002. And Romney’s state financial disclosure forms indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain “executive” in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings.
And this is a big deal why?...
Felony? Some articles say it could be. I have little working knowledge of such things though
Kinda my thoughts too. If he's the sole shareholder, it's his company. If he wants to take time away to go work on the Olympics and leave someone else in charge of the day to day operations he's free to do so without having an obligation to sell his company and officially resign from it.
But it's an election and both sides play the "gotcha" game, so point for blue team for coming up with something that looks bad, even though there's nothing wrong with it.
not sure it is one, but if the Romney is a liar meme catches fire it could sink him.
Mitt Romney is without any doubt whatsoever the not only the biggest liar, but also the most casual one, ever to run for president during my lifetime.
puts Bill Clinton in the shade
Ya. Was listening to Diane Rehm this morning and one of the panelist made the point that the Obama campaign has moved beyond painting Romney as a rich out of touch asshole to trying to portray him as a deceitful and dirty person. Could work and kinda true.
I'd rather have a beer with Romney than Obama.
I'd snort coke with Obama if he provided it, though.
Yeah, but you're a racist.
do robots drink beer?
"Romney is a liar"
Just so far, and there will be lost of verification by many, he's a liar.
============
"As Bain Capital has said, as Governor Romney has said, and as has been confirmed by independent fact checker multiple times, Governor Romney left Bain Capital in February of 1999 to run the Olympics and had no input on investments or management of companies after that point."
Yet Romney's sworn testimony appears to back up the SEC filings and contradict his personal disclosure forms submitted to Massachusetts officials in 2002, in which he said that he retired from Bain on Feb. 11, 1999.
Romney's lawyer at the Massachusetts hearing said that Romney's work in the private sector continued "unabated" while he ran the Olympics: "He succeeded in that three-year period in restoring confidence in the Olympic Games, closing that disastrous deficit and staging one of the most successful Olympic Games ever to occur on U.S. soil. Now while all that was going on, very much in the public eye, what happened to his private and public ties to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? And the answer is they continued unabated just as they had."
Instead of leaving in 1999, Romney suggested in his testimony that he only left Bain after the Olympics in 2002: “I left on the basis of a leave of absence indicating that I, by virtue of that le, would return at the end of the Olympics to my employment at Bain Capital, but subsequently decided not to do so and entered into a departure agreement with my former partners. I use that in the colloquial sense, not legal sense, but my former partners."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...=Daily%20Brief
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/poli...campaign=sm_tw
Mormons drink?
The reason the press is making a big deal out of this is because Romney claims that Bain Capital off shored jobs after he left the company. Reports are now claiming that he left the company at a later date, meaning he could have had a hand in off shoring jobs. This story is basically going to be the Liberal equivalent of Fast and Furious, a small story that is blown way out of proportion for political theatrics.
The whole argument of whether or not he was responsible for off shoring jobs is irrelevant. Everyone knows he would have if it made his company money. That was his job, and he was very good at it. That is also why the criticism of said business is fair game, because he uses his years in the business world as evidence that he would make a good president. If you tout your time in the private sector, it will be used against you as much as it is used for you.
I knew that was why they were trying to make a big deal out of it but Obama also off shored jobs with stimulus money for "green" companies so that is pretty much a non starter argument.
Maybe this is why Gecko gave 23 years of tax returns to McLiar, but refuses now to give more than a year or two. With those 23 years, we could if he were paid by Bain after 1999 and paid as a director of Bain's takeover targets.
Next we're going to find out Mitt lied about being a US citizen.
FactCheck.org is standing by their assessment that Mitt Romney did not actively manage Bain Capital after February 1999, despite today's Boston Globe report that he was CEO there until 2002.
"We see little new in the Globe piece. So far, nobody has shown that Romney was actually managing Bain — even part-time — during his time at the Olympics, or that he was anything but a passive, absentee owner during that time, as both Romney and Bain have long said," Brooks Jackson, a co-author of the FactCheck piece, told POLITICO today.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/...ry-128751.html
http://factcheck.org/2012/07/romneys...me-conclusion/
The Pinocchio Test
The Obama campaign is blowing smoke here.We realize that Bauer gets to the word “criminal” by mentioning “investigation,” but that distinction might be lost on most listeners.
Meanwhile, the weight of evidence suggests that Romney did in fact end active management of Bain in 1999. He stated that in a federal disclosure form he signed, under threat of criminal penalties. He said he was a “former employee” in a state disclosure form. A state commission concluded 10 years ago that he did, indeed, leave Bain in 1999. Investors in Bain funds were told he was not part of the management team.
The SEC do ents, especially the ones Romney signed, do raise some questions. One can certainly argue that because Romney did not fully extricate himself from Bain till after his Olympic sojourn ended, he should bear some responsibility for what happened in that period. But that is an entirely different matter than suggesting that he is a potential criminal. It is more of a PR problem, which the Obama campaign is trying to exploit to build a larger case that Romney is secretive.
We were tempted to award this claim Four Pinocchios, but the do ents with his signature leave some room for inquiry. But, overall, they shrink in importance to the other evidence cited above. (Our colleagues at FactCheck.Org also reaffirmed their similar conclusion.)
Still, if the Obama campaign wants to put its money where its mouth is, it should immediately lodge a complaint about Romney’s financial disclosure form, filed just last year, rather than try to mislead people about potential violations in relatively unimportant SEC do ents.
Three Pinocchios
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...html#pagebreak
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...zUfW_blog.html
he could say his retirement started in 1999.
UPDATE: Fortune obtained the offering do ents for a Bain Capital Fund circulating in June 2000, as well as a fund in 2001. None of the do ents show that Romney was listed as being among the “key investment professionals.” As Fortune put it, “the contemporaneous Bain do ents show that Romney was indeed telling the truth about no longer having operational input at Bain -- which, one should note, is different from no longer having legal or financial ties to the firm.”
For interested readers, below is a summary of what we, FactCheck.org and Fortune magazine have previously concluded.
The Fact Checker, Jan. 18, 2012
A 2002 statement he filed with the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission on his financial interests lists ownership of various Bain en ies, some of which appear to intersect with the funds that invested in KB Toys. The do ent says that Romney is “a passive, limited partner [with] no management capacity” in many of these funds.
In the Massachusetts do ent, Romney is also listed as 100 percent owner of “Bain Capital Inc.” But there is less than meets the eye here. Bain Capital Inc. was the management firm, which was paid a management fee to run the funds and actually made virtually no profit, since it existed to pay salaries and expenses. After Romney formally left Bain in 2001, a new en y called “Bain Capital LLC” took over the management function.
By virtually all accounts, Romney was focused on the Olympics in the 1999-2002 period. Yet because Romney had not legally separated from Bain, his name is littered across Securities and Exchange Commission filings concerning Bain Capital deals during this period. The crazy quilt of private-equity structures, in some ways, makes his ownership appear even more ominous, as the filings list hundreds of thousands of shares controlled by Romney.
Even so, it is a real stretch to claim that Romney — himself — “closed” these stores. No evidence has emerged that he was involved in the KB Toys transaction. Indeed, when creditors sued over the dividend payment, they named six Bain-controlled en ies and three Bain executives who had served on the board of KB Holdings.
Given that the plaintiffs’ lawyers will try to list as many defendants as possible to try to force a settlement, one can be certain Romney would have been named if there had been any hint of his involvement. But he was not named, despite the SEC filings suggesting his control of the shares.
In other words, creditors apparently had determined Romney was only a passive investor.
FactCheck.Org, July 2, 2012
.
If the Obama campaign were correct, Romney would be guilty of a federal felony by certifying on federal financial disclosure forms that he left active management of Bain Capital in February 1999….
And after reviewing evidence cited by the Obama campaign, we reaffirm our conclusion that Romney left the helm of Bain Capital when he took a leave of absence in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics – as he has said repeatedly — and never returned to active management. The Obama campaign’s recent ads thus mislead when they point to investments made by Bain, as well as management decisions made by companies in which Bain invested, after that time.
What does the Obama campaign have in rebuttal? Very little, and none of it convincing in our judgment.
Much of the Obama campaign’s letter is devoted to quoting portions of do ents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In summary, the letter states there are “at least 63 filings with that agency after March 1, 1999 that list various Bain en ies and describe them as ‘wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.’” That’s true, but not relevant.
We have never disputed that Romney remained the owner of Bain while he was running the Olympics committee. The issue always has been, who was running Bain? Nothing in the SEC do ents contradicts what Romney has certified as true.
On that point, the Obama campaign cites snippets of a few news clippings to make a case that Romney was still a part-time manager of Bain after he left to run the Olympics. But a close reading shows these news accounts don’t contradict Romney either.
Fortune Magazine, July 2, 2012
Remember, Romney did not leave Bain Capital as part of a long-term, planned succession process. Instead, his departure was fairly sudden — borne of a desire to help salvage an Olympic Games that was $1.4 billion in the hole and tarred by a massive bribery scandal. The very first reports of Romney being considered for the Salt Lake City job were on Feb. 2, 1999. Just nine days later, he officially took over.
Not surprisingly, Bain Capital hadn’t worked out all the details of Romney’s departure. It eventually would discard the CEO position in favor of a horizontal management committee made up of numerous partners, and provide Romney with a golden parachute that included limited partnership interests in all Bain-related funds raised through 2009 (including the option for Romney to invest additional monies). But none of that was in place when Romney took the Salt Lake City job.
Moreover, unwinding a private equity firm’s ownership structure is extremely complicated. The “firm” itself is largely a legal construct of convenience, since it doesn’t pay salaries, make investments or do much of anything else. Instead, what matters are the individual funds.
In the case of Bain Capital’s funds, it’s reasonable to assume that Romney was considered a “key man,” meaning that each fund’s limited partners could have voted to end the fund’s investment period — or take over fund management themselves — if a super-majority felt it prudent. But that didn’t happen, and Bain saw no reason to expend massive administrative effort to amend existing funds. Instead, it asked Romney to sign do ents when necessary, and made the managerial/ownership changes on new funds going forward….
The part about lying to the SEC is absurd, since the SEC doesn’t require an owner to be the operational decision-maker (Romney delegated such responsibilities, as is his right).
Ew, O'douls...
lol blue team
Another indication the Obama team has no clue about the corporate world, how it works, and why they should quit ing with it.
didn't our previous president claim he was going to run the USA like a company and he was going to be the CEO of the country?
how did that work out?
Gecko running from his health care mandate in MA (which he calls a tax when Barry does it), while putting Bain forward as his supreme qualification is turning out to be a failing strategy.
Like all his "nail ladies", he and his stupid handlers just don't get it.
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