On Thursday Gawker released a trove of 950 pages of documents related to Mitt Romney’s dealings at Bain Capital. These papers reveal that Bain is not what most Americans would think of a as a conventional business. Instead it’s “an intricate suite of steadily proliferating inter-related holding companies and limited partnerships, some based in Delaware and others in the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and elsewhere, designed to collectively house roughly $66 billion in wealth in its many crevices and chambers.”
One revealing document shows that Romney’s retirement plan includes holdings in a company that wasn’t created until 2002, in the heat of his campaign for governor. This confirms what a Bain employee revealed to Chris Hayes on MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes earlier this summer: Romney remained CEO of Bain until 2002, three years after he “left,” in order to maintain leverage as he negotiated his retirement package. This fact is crucial as it implicates Romney is some of Bain’s most controversial layoffs — including those at GST Steel and KB Toys.
Another gem is a 2010 Powerpoint presentation from Sankaty Advisors LLC, the credit affiliate of Bain Capital. A slide called “Market Opportunities/Altered Landscape” says “Regulation will improve liquidity and transparency.” The regulation this document refers to is the Dodd-Frank Act, the Democratic banking reform law passed in response to the financial crisis.
But Romney now promises to repeal Dodd-Frank. His website says, “President Obama’s expansive agenda has brought the costs of excessive regulation into high-resolution focus. A number of his major initiatives like Dodd-Frank and Obamacare represent a quantum increase in the scale of the regulatory burden on the American economy.”
This directly contradicts Bain’s own finding in 2010.
Romney left Bain in approximately 2002. He loves to claim credit for any good they did long after he left or Bain sold a company. But you won’t see him taking credit for this sensible presentation.
