July 12, 2012 10:56 PM UTC

The SEC Hates Mitt Romney

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• by: jaytee

The multimillionaire Republican presidential candidate has battled to control the narrative of his time running Bain Capital, the private equity juggernaut he led until  1999 or, as it turns out, probably later. Bain invested in some companies to make money by saving them. It invested in others to make money by shuttering them. Romney says he isn’t responsible for any bankruptcies and layoffs the company might have orchestrated after he left. Filings with the SEC say he headed the company until 2002, not 1999, as he maintains. Romney either lied on the stump or to the SEC.      

There’s more bad news for Romney from the SEC today.

Filings unearthed and reported on today by David Corn counter another Romney stump assertion about his time at Bain. The candidate says he didn’t make money from or otherwise abet the outsourcing industry that drained the US of jobs over the last two decades. Yet he did, according to the documents, not just through Bain but through accounts of a corporation based in Bermuda that he controlled entirely.

Under Romney’s leadership, Bain invested in Hong Kong-based Global Tech Appliances, which sought to capitalize specifically on outsourcing by relocating US manufacturing and assembling jobs to Asia, where labor and materials are cheaper.

Mother Jones:

An SEC filing submitted on December 21, 1998, reported that the Bain affiliate [Brookside Capital] now controlled only 4.63 percent of the company’s shares [in Global Tech]. But Brookside was sharing its stake in Global-Tech with Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors LTD- a Bermuda-based corporation of which Romney was the “the sole shareholder, a director, and President.” That is, Romney had split his Global-Tech holdings between two of his various business entities. (The SEC filing doesn’t indicate why he did that.)

Sankaty is a story in itself. It was recently the focus of an Associated Press investigation that reported that Sankaty “is among several Romney holdings that have not been fully disclosed” and that there is a “mystery surrounding” Sankaty. Reporting on this Romney entity, Vanity Fair noted that “investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in ‘jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,’ as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it.” With Sankaty, Romney was using a mysterious Bermuda-based entity to invest in a Chinese firm that thrived on US outsourcing.  

That sounds like a good way to make money. It doesn’t the least bit sound like the work of a person who wants to champion American workers of the middle class.