Bain Capital started with help of offshore investors

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Los Angeles Times

Bain Capital started with help of offshore investors
Mitt Romney's firm raised more than a third of its first investment fund from wealthy foreigners — who mostly used companies in Panama, then known for tax advantages and banking secrecy.



Mitt Romney in 1990 with Bain & Co. founder Bill Bain, who reportedly barred him from
seeking company clients that would have to disclose investments. (Boston Globe, Justine
Schiavo / October 29, 1990)

By Joseph Tanfani, Melanie Mason and Matea Gold
6:00 a.m. EDT, July 19, 2012
Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — When Mitt Romney launched Bain Capital in 1984, he struggled at first to raise enough money for the untested venture. Old-money families like the Rothschilds turned down the young Boston consultant.

So he and his partners tapped an eclectic roster of investors, raising more than a third of their first $37-million investment fund from wealthy foreigners.
Most of the foreign investors' money came through corporations registered in Panama, then known for tax advantages and unusual banking secrecy.

Previously unreported details, documented in Massachusetts corporate filings and other public records, show that Bain Capital was enmeshed in the largely opaque world of international high finance from its very inception.


Read more: http://www.mcall.com/business/la-na-bain-creation-20120719,0,1014072.story

[Rosa Luxemburg]

1. The more that is unearthed the worse it gets for him

[Chiyo-chichi]

2. Is that Bill Bain or C. Montgomery Burns?

[Judi Lynn]

3. So hard to tell! Thanks for the great image! n/t

[GreenMask]

4. Foreign money is BAD?

So...people investing from foreign lands into the US is bad?

[UpInArms]

6. depends if they are wanting to buy our government

or its elected officials.

[electricray]

7. Sometimes it is very bad

Especially when you consider that the idea behind this company was to extract value from healthy American companies and then shutter them and push the jobs those companies used to provide out of the country. The business model was bad enough when it was just bankrupting healthy companies with well-trained and compensated workforces. But when you add in the fact that they were doing it in order to benefit foreign investors it starts to border on actual anti-American behavior. I don't toss that type of rhetoric around lightly, outsourcing doesn't make you anti-American on its own. You could have a greater hope for America and believe that outsourcing could help achieve it. You would be wrong, but you wouldn't be anti-American. Gathering foreign investors to move value and wealth away from America is a wholly different scenario. That is entirely anti-American. Romney believes he is global royalty and we are all peasants in the new feudalism. That type of imperial doctrine has nothing to do with nationalism because national boundaries and patriotism equate to lower profit margins to Romney-types.

[freshwest]

8. +1,000

This really is what people need to be deciding in this election, because this is the opposing vision. A country that will struggle its way to more equality or simply be a series of fiefdoms sold to plutocrats. They used to call these guys royals and pirates. Now they have changed their titles, but the game is the same. And as they get bigger and more powerful in the scheme of things, a portion of American society will be worse off than the old third world countries. Because most of them still had some of nature's bounty to flee to or survive from. We don't.

[JDPriestly]

5. And now Adelson with his Macau/Chinese money is supporting Romney.

Who is really behind the Romney machine?

That is the big question of this election. Who besides the Mormon Church and its members?

Who was hiding behind the Panama accounts? The Pope and the Catholic church? The Mafia? The Russian or Japanese or Chinese mafias? The Greek shipping magnates? Some Middle Eastern sheik? Osama Bin Laden? Michael Milken, et al.? Could be anyone? Could be someone from Central or South America.

We need to know this because this could be yet another financial coup in our country. Where is Greg Palast when we need him?

[stevenleser]

9. This is really big news.

Panama, as much as I love it as my mother was born there and i have been there a lot, is the money laundering capital of the world.

This doesnt mean that there definitely was nefarious dealings with the Bain money, but it sure as heck makes me suspicious.