Romney kept reins, bargained hard on severance

[maddezmom]

Last edited Fri Jul 20, 2012, 08:10 PM - Edit history (1)

Source: The Boston Globe

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The Palm Beach meeting, which has not been previously reported, demonstrates the duality of Romney’s role as he parted ways with Bain, an issue that has sparked controversy in his presidential campaign. Romney has said in financial disclosure statements that he “was not involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way” after Feb. 11, 1999. But he was still legally the CEO, with numerous duties and obligations that were his alone, until early 2002.


Interviews with a half-dozen of Romney’s former partners and associates, as well as public records, show that he was not merely an absentee owner during this period. He signed dozens of company documents, including filings with regulators on a vast array of Bain’s investment entities. And he drove the complex negotiations over his own large severance package, a deal that was critical to the firm’s future without him, according to his former associates.


Indeed, by remaining CEO and sole shareholder, Romney held on to his leverage in the talks that resulted in his generous 10-year retirement package, according to former associates.


“The elephant in the room was not whether Mitt was involved in investment decisions but Mitt’s retention of control of the firm and therefore his ability to extract a huge economic benefit by delaying his giving up of that control,” said one former associate, who, like some other Romney associates, spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the company.


Read more: http://www.boston.com/news/politics/articles/2012/07/20/romney_kept_reins_bargained_hard_on_severance/

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New Questions About Timing Of Romney's Bain Departure

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"When a candidate is speaking in the technical language of a specific kind of business enterprise, the public is going to have difficulty understanding what he's saying," she says.

Romney's challenge is made harder because he didn't officially retire from Bain until 2001. That was after negotiating a severance package that continued to pay Romney for a decade after he'd left for Salt Lake City.

"When one uses a word such as retroactive retirement, or when one is explaining how one continues to get income, even though one is not actually managing day-to-day operations, one is dealing in a universe that most of us have no experience with," Jamieson says.

In contrast, President Obama's argument about Romney is straightforward.

"I think most Americans figure if you're the chairman, CEO and president of a company, that you are responsible for what that company does," Obama said last week in an interview with Washington, D.C., television station WJLA.

more: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/07/20/157127103/new-questions-about-timing-of-romneys-bain-departure

[Ruby the Liberal]

1. Keep digging, Globe!

[maddezmom]

2. me thinks there is more to come

it's the drip, drip, drip that will destroy his side of the story.

[Ruby the Liberal]

3. I think David Corn had something big coming out today

(or so he mentioned last night on Ed). I need to go check MoJo and see whats up.

[maddezmom]

4. Rmoney = Greedy

and of course a liar. Found this:


Romney Invested Millions in Firms That Pioneered High-Tech Outsourcing

EXCLUSIVE: A government document shows that at Bain he held a $54 million stake in companies that manufactured electronics in China and Mexico for US firms.

—By David Corn and Nick Baumann

| Fri Jul. 20, 2012 3:00 AM PDT


In recent weeks, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have accused each other of being an "outsourcer in chief," as their campaigns have tussled over Romney's past at Bain Capital and the (non)release of his tax returns. But all this scuffling hasn't taken into account an until-now unreported fact about Romney's days at Bain: When he was running the private equity firm, he invested tens of millions of dollars in a pair of companies that specialized in outsourcing high-tech manufacturing and that developed offshore production facilities in Mexico, China, and elsewhere to build electronics for US firms.


In March 1999, shortly after Romney left Bain to take over the troubled Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Brookside Capital Investors Inc., a Bain-related entity wholly owned by Romney, filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission that listed dozens of companies in which Brookside held a stake the previous quarter. The roster included investments in Singapore-based Flextronics International ($13 million) and Florida-headquartered Jabil Circuit Inc. ($41 million), two companies that were leaders in the fast-growing field of outsourcing electronics manufacturing and offshoring production to low-wage countries. Together, these two investments represented almost 10 percent of Brookside's $559 million portfolio.

For much of the 1990s, most overseas outsourcing involved unsophisticated products like apparel. But in the second half of that decade, US high-tech companies producing computers, telecommunications equipment, and other electronics began contracting out their manufacturing to firms that had established production facilities both in the United States and in overseas locales where labor was cheap.

[Read the full article]
http://www.motherjones.com/authors/david-corn

[wordpix]

11. David Corn keeps getting better and better on MSNBC

I'm a big fan

[itsrobert]

8. The Globe has already dug

I think they have the evidence and they are slowly going about this releasing nuggets along the way.

[Politicalboi]

5. Rmoney will be lucky

If he doesn't land in jail instead of the WH. I certainly hope he does. 5 boys, 5 baked cakes from some 7/11 bakery with hacksaws in them.

[Cali_Democrat]

6. Key paragraph:

James Cox, a professor of corporate and securities law at Duke University, said Bain’s continued reference to Romney as CEO and sole shareholder indicated that Romney was still the final authority. Moreover, Cox said, Romney would likely have been updated regularly about Bain Capital’s profits while he was negotiating his severance package. As a result, Cox said, Romney’s statement that he had no involvement with “any Bain Capital entity” appears “inconsistent” with his actions.

[maddezmom]

7. and in commoner speak

Rmoney is a liar.

[DallasNE]

9. When GOP Talking Heads

Last week claimed that the reason Bain had not bothered to remove Romney from some ceremonial duties like signing SEC documents and changing letter heads was because it was not a priority with them.

My response was bullcrap. It was Romney who refused to give up the title and responsibilities because he wanted the leverage to negotiate a superior severance package. So it has been with every other excuse Romney and pals have come up with, such as retroactive retirement. Romney needs to release the agreement for when he was in Utah and his final letter of resignation, including effective date.

Romney has always been in control of the release of data to support his talking points. He has refused to do this. Why? What is he hiding? The same goes with his tax returns. So far he has released a partial copy of his 2010 return and an estimate of his 2011 return that does not reflect his expected $200,000 refund.

Just as Nixon was not allowed to get away with edited transcripts of Watergate, Romney cannot be allowed to release only 1 full year of federal tax returns and no State tax returns. I am not a crook is not enough.

[truthisfreedom]

10. And here I was afraid rMoney would keep this election from being fun.

It gets funner every day! His poll numbers are being lowered by the very thing he hoped would raise them. His business experience. Except his business experience seems to consist largely of gaming America and making up shit. Hardly Presidential material.

[SkyDaddy7]

12. None of this will matter...

The main stream media has long forgot this issue & without them 99% of the voting public will not know much about it. Hell, the websites supposedly dedicated to the truth have defended Romney on this.= when it appears obvious according to the Globe Romney was most certainly involved in Bain's biznaz from 1999-2002!

Oh well.

[Samantha]

13. I wonder if he can claim "carried over interest" exemption on his taxes for the investment profit

starting this company gave him as a severance package. I am thinking it is an investment company, he started it, his retirement compensation is going to be paid out over ten years, one can extend carried over interest from year to year occasionally managing ten years on the same year of investment profit claimed. If he did that, it would be reflected on his income tax returns ....

Sam