So when exactly did Mitt Romney resign from Bain Capital? He has long said 1999 – which gets him off responsibility for some bad p.r. for Bain in the subsequent three years, especially on outsourcing and off-shoring. But the Boston Globe has several legal documents showing that Romney remained
chief executive and chairman of the firm three years beyond the date he said he ceded control, even creating five new investment partnerships during that time.
Romney has said he left Bain in 1999 to lead the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, ending his role in the company. But public Securities and Exchange Commission documents filed later by Bain Capital state he remained the firm’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president.”
Also, a Massachusetts financial disclosure form Romney filed in 2003 states that he still owned 100 percent of Bain Capital in 2002. And Romney’s state financial disclosure forms indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain “executive” in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings.
Maybe this is a technical snafu caused by elaborate federal and state legal technicalities. But who gets paid $100,000 a year for two years for work as an executive in a company he has already quit?
A former SEC commissioner told the Globe that the SEC documents listing Romney as Bain’s chief executive between 1999 and 2002 cannot be dismissed so easily. “You can’t say statements filed with the SEC are meaningless. This is a fact in an SEC filing,” said Roberta S. Karmel, now a professor at Brooklyn Law School.
“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,” Karmel continued. “Was he getting paid? He’s the sole stockholder. Are you telling me he owned the company but had no say in its investments?”
The Romney campaign surely needs to provide evidence for its side of the argument as strong as the Globe's. Or else it will have been caught in a fishy piece of misdirection. It doesn't help that it is currently calling the president a liar for pinning outsourcing in the years in question at Bain on Romney, claiming that Romney wasn't in charge of Bain at the time. If he was, that matters. Geraghty's spin – the best I've seen from the right so far – is just a partisan debating point; it doesn't address the substantive issue.
But here's why this is lose-lose for Romney. It's another day when the focus is on his vast wealth, rather than on Obama's economic record; and even the best case in defense of Romney must argue that he got paid at least $100,000 a year for doing nothing. A lot of Americans may wonder how that can happen, how the rules they live by simply don't apply to people with Romney's massive wealth.
The Dish 