900 Pages of Bain Capital Files Leaked

The website Gawker has obtained over 900 pages of financial disclosure files from Mitt Romney's Bain Capital. This is huge with the Republican National Convention looming next week.

The Bain Files: Inside Mitt Romney's Cayman Schemes

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. 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.

Bain isn't a company so much as 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.

Much, much more at these links, with apparently more to come:

Equity Swaps, AIVs, and Mitt Romney's Other Tax-Dodging Tricks

Mitt Romney's Endless ‘Retirement' Package

How Mitt Romney Puts His Money Where Obama's Mouth Is

Derivatives, Short Sales, and Mitt Romney's Other Exotic Financial Instruments

Mitt Romney Is the National Enquirer's Banker

From the last link, Romney not only is involved in the company that owns National Enquirer - that's odd enough - but he's involved with many gambling companies, just like his good pal Sheldon Adelson. Actually, these articles make Bain Capital's spin-off, Sankaty, sound like the Loan Shark of the Cayman Islands.

Sankaty High Yield Partners II also lent money to such un-Mormon concerns as Las Vegas Sands, LLC ($3 million), which operates casinos in Las Vegas and China; Motor City Casinos ($1.8 million), and Yonkers Racing Corporation ($214,000). Not to mention Core-Mark, a nationwide cigarette distributor ($13 million in bonds). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, for which Romney has served as a bishop and "stake president," opposes gambling and smoking. Mother Jones' David Corn has detailed another Romney holding—Brookside Capital Investors Inc.—that also held substantial gambling-related investments, despite Romney's record of opposing "access to gaming" due to its "social costs."

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I urge everyone to spend some time reading each link. It's a treasure trove of riches about Bain.

Ann Romney: No More Tax Returns

In an interview today with Rock Center's Natalie Morales, Ann Romney reiterated that she and her husband will never release those tax returns.

NBC Rock Center Video

Natalie Morales: Why not be transparent? Why not release more than the 2010, or the estimates for 2011?

Ann Romney (leans forward): Have you seen how we've been attacked? Have you seen what's happened?

Morales: It's been in the press quite a bit. Now are you angry that it's been in the press? I mean, should you not be questioned about your finances?

Ann Romney: We have been very transparent to what's legally required of us. But the more release, the more we get attacked, the more we get questioned, the more we get pushed. (Points finger at journalist for emphasis) We have done what's legally required, and there's going to be no more, no more tax releases given, and there's a reason for that, and that's because of how . . . what happens as soon as we release anything.
Mitt's financial disclosures when he was governor are huge! If people want to really look and see - any question they have. The other thing they have to understand is that Mitt is honest, his integrity is just golden. We pay our taxes, we are absolutely . . . beyond paying our taxes we also give 10% of our income to charity, so we have no issues that way.
The only reason we don't disclose anymore is, you know, we just become a bigger target.

Morales: So it's because you'll face more questions?

Ann Romney: It'll just give them more ammunition.

Morales: To the American people, though, when they hear about perhaps, accounts with your name on it overseas in tax shelters, they feel like you may be hiding something.

(Ann squirms, crosses legs rather defensively)

Ann Romney: There's nothing we're hiding. You know, we've had a blind trust for how many years? We don't even know what's in there. It's been managed by a blind trust since before Mitt was governor. 2002 - forward. And so, you know - I'll be curious to see what's in there, too. (smiles)

Ugh ~ Her middle name should be "Imperious."

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Happy Place Diversion: Romney Girl Song

    Lyrics Via Alternet

Romney Girl Official Website

In 2010, Miss Swiss left Geneva (after safely depositing all of her own money into a Swiss bank account) and moved to Searchlight, Nevada, where she joined a small Swiss expat community of retired yodelers and milkmaids. It was there she bumped into Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid while burning his book “The Good Fight” during a local sheep-shearing festival. Miss Swiss told Senator Reid about Mr. Romney’s tax avoidance “because I thought it was so funny that a Senator would actually think that rich people pay taxes! So silly!” Miss Swiss has not heard from Mr. Romney since he began his Presidential run, but believes he is following her on Twitter @realromneygirl. In her free time, Miss Swiss, AKA Romney Girl, enjoys watching sitcoms like Fox & Friends, climbing the Swiss Alps, making cheese fondue, and listening to her favorite pop band Aqua. Romney Girl recently gained public attention for inadvertently informing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that that Mitt Romney had paid zero taxes in the last ten years.

Romney's Bain Gave Italy the Business

I wrote earlier today about the economic dangers in the Eurozone, and the negativity of Italy's Prime Minister Mario Monti, who told Der Spiegel that Europe is going through a "psychological dissolution." Wow - that's a strong statement. But some of their problems stem back to the 1990s, when the Italian government was selling off assets to raise money to enter the Eurozone. One of those investors was Mitt Romney's Bain Capital.

Bloomberg has the story about Bain buying up Italy's telephone directory, then selling it back to them a few years later at a huge profit. This is a good insight into the way Romney did business - and yes, he was involved through his offices in Boston at the same time that he supposedly wasn't the CEO while working on the Utah Olympics.

Oh, and the profits? Most were hidden in the tax-shelter country of Luxembourg.

This past history in Europe is not as easily etch-a-sketched as Mitt's Olympic excesses or his absent tax returns in the U.S.

Bloomberg: Romney Persona Non Grata in Italy

Bain Capital, under Romney as chief executive officer, made about $1 billion in a leveraged buyout 12 years ago that remains controversial in Italy to this day. Bain was part of a group that bought a telephone-directory company from the Italian government and then sold it about two years later, at the peak of the technology bubble, for about 25 times what it paid.

. . . Romney himself probably earned more than $50 million, and possibly as much as $60 million from the Italian directory sale of Seat Pagine Gialle SpA, according to a person familiar with the matter. The deal turned into one of the biggest windfalls of his tenure.

. . . When Bain sold the directory business in 2000, Romney, while still holding the title of CEO, was in charge of preparations for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Romney has contended that he gave up management control of Bain in February 1999 to run the games.

“Mitt Romney and Bain played the role of successful financial speculators at the peril of the Italian government and the small stock-market investors who were burned by the sharp decline in Seat (PG) shares,” said Giovanni Pons, a journalist for la Repubblica and co-author of “L’Affare Telecom” (2002), which recounts details of the Bain deal.

. . . Bain moved profits through a series of subsidiaries in Luxembourg, a country that makes it easy to get cash out without paying taxes, according to corporate filings. Corporate records in Luxembourg show Bain carried out technical steps for a tax- free repatriation of profits to the U.S.

Obama Ad Tackles Romney's Offshore Accounts

This new ad is awesome! How many ordinary Americans know someone with offshore accounts? I would wager about One Percent of us do. ;) And in case you aren't familiar with the Cayman Islands, I've thrown in a video about them. "Service is excellent."