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[StephanieVanbryce]

Investigative reporting at it's best__Vanity Fair's Brutal Offshore Banking Piece Just Sank Mitt's Candidacy

Thanks BOREALIS! ..hadn't heard a thing about this! will read . . it's a MUST DO!.. ;)

Earlier today . . .

Yowch! An article By Nicholas Shaxson in the latest Vanity Fair Magazine lays bare the quasi-
criminal financial shenanigans of one Willard Romney.

An excerpt:

A person who worked for Mitt Romney at the consulting firm Bain and Co. in 1977 remembers him with mixed feelings. “Mitt was … a really wonderful boss,” the former employee says. “He was nice, he was fair, he was logical, he said what he wanted … he was really encouraging.” But Bain and Co., the person recalls, pushed employees to find out secret revenue and sales data on its clients’ competitors. Romney, the person says, suggested “falsifying” who they were to get such information, by pretending to be a graduate student working on a proj­ect at Harvard. (The person, in fact, was a Harvard student, at Bain for the summer, but not working on any such proj­ects.) “Mitt said to me something like ‘We won’t ask you to lie. I am not going to tell you to do this, but [it is] a really good way to get the information.’ … I would not have had anything in my analysis if I had not pretended.

...

To give but one example, there is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as “a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.” It could be that Sankaty is an old vehicle with little importance, but Romney appears to have treated it rather carefully. He set it up in 1997, then transferred it to his wife’s newly created blind trust on January 1, 2003, the day before he was inaugurated as Massachusetts’s governor. The director and president of this entity is R. Bradford Malt, the trustee of the blind trust and Romney’s personal lawyer. Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an “excepted investment fund” that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates. While the Romneys’ spokespeople insist that the couple has paid all the taxes required by law, 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.

That’s not the only money Romney has in tax havens. Because of his retirement deal with Bain Capital, his finances are still deeply entangled with the private-equity firm that he founded and spun off from Bain and Co. in 1984. Though he left the firm in 1999, Romney has continued to receive large payments from it—in early June he revealed more than $2 million in new Bain income. The firm today has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million, hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers. Again, the Romney campaign insists he saves no tax by using them, but there is no way to check this.

I doff my hat to E. Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, for fearlessly pursuing this story. And I highly recommend reading the entire article, then sending it to everyone you know.

UPDATE 1:

Big h/t to Mariken for discovering that the Obama Campaign has already tweeted out this article:

__Vanity Fair on “Romney’s familiarity with foreign tax havens,” including Switzerland and Grand Cayman:

https://mobile.twitter.com/BarackObama
https://mobile.twitter.com/BarackObama/tweets

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/03/1105621/-Vanity-Fair-s-Brutal-Offshore-Banking-Piece-Just-Sank-Mitt-s-Candidacy