Post by amoeba15 on Jul 12, 2012 14:25:20 GMT -5
If he did, it would prove they were right.
Romney and Bain Capital: The Secrecy is Killing Him
The clash between the demands of a Presidential campaign and the private-equity industry’s culture of secrecy was always going to be a problem for Romney. So it has proved. For as long as he and his former firm refuse to shed more light on their activities and finances, investigative reporters and Democratic researchers will continue to dig for nuggets of information that can be portrayed in a negative light.
This latest story appears to fall into that category. It’s not news that, in some of its official filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bain Capital continued to describe Romney as an executive of the firm well after he stopped working there full-time and went to rescue the Salt Lake City Olympics. The Globe’s contribution was to unearth more of these documents, submitted by four different business units associated with Bain.
Romney’s campaign has said that the descriptions of him as a Bain executive were just legal boilerplate, reflecting the fact that it wasn’t until 2002, three years after he stopped working for Bain Capital on a day-to-day basis, that he and the firm reached a severance agreement. Today, Team Romney reiterated that message, and Bain Capital issued a statement saying: “Mitt Romney retired from Bain Capital in February 1999. He has had no involvement in the management or investment activities of Bain Capital, or with any of its portfolio companies, since that time.”
But this statement raises as many questions as it answers. If Romney had “retired” from Bain Capital, why did the firm continue to describe him as its chairman and chief executive? And if he was still the firm’s “sole stockholder,” can he really have been as detached from its activities as he claims? “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to say he was technically in charge on paper but he had nothing to do with Bain’s operations,” Robert S. Karmel, a former S.E.C. commissioner who teaches at Brooklyn Law School, told the Globe. “Was he getting paid? He’s the sole stockholder. Are you telling me he owned the company but had no say in its investments?”
On top of everything else, the timing of the Globe story is horrible for Romney. In recent days, he’s been trying to move beyond criticisms of his campaign, some of them from Republicans—both about policy matters (e.g. his lack of a coherent economic plan) and his failure to hit back aggressively to attacks on his record. “If you’re responding, you are losing,” Romney told Fox News yesterday.
Today, Romney is responding.
www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/07/romney-and-bain-capital-the-opacity-is-killing-him.html
