... What was the advantage of setting up Sankaty High Yield Assets Investors Ltd.? The American lawyer who set up Romney's corporation in Bermuda declined to comment for this report. So did Romney's longtime associate, Brad Malt, who administers the trust where it's now held. ...NPR
Wait. The advantage is clear to many Americans.
Experts say Romney appears to have set up a retirement account in Bermuda with hedge fund-type investments that would otherwise be taxed in the U.S. James Hines is an international tax expert at the University of Michigan.
"We don't have full knowledge of Gov. Romney's tax situation, so we can't say for sure, but yeah, it looks like ... you can call it tax avoidance," he says. "You can call it facilitating investments that otherwise wouldn't be ... profitable." ...NPR
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That gnarly Bain problem
Steve Kornacki, at Salon, examines Mitt Romney's post-Massachusetts career, his time in Salt Lake City, and his tentative moves back to politics. How does Bain actually factor into Romney's life during that period?
... It makes all the sense in the world that he would have held on to his leadership titles at Bain and planned to return after the games. For most of the time he was in Utah, politics was not a realistic option for Romney’s immediate post-Olympic career. And because of this, it makes all the sense in the world that Romney would have remained apprised of Bain’s activities while in Utah and maintained some level of engagement, even if he wasn’t directly involved in the company’s day-to-day activities. That’s pretty much what Romney told the ballot commission in June ’02, when he termed his ’99 departure a leave of absence and explained that during his Salt Lake years he’d come back to the state for “a number of social trips and business trips that brought me back to Massachusetts, board meetings, Thanksgiving and so forth.”
Romney didn’t start pushing the idea that he’d severed all ties with Bain in ’99 until late in the ’02 campaign, when Democrats played up Bain’s closure of a Kansas City steel plant, a move that cost 700 workers their jobs. Confronted with this potentially damaging attack, Romney pleaded ignorance, insisting he couldn’t have had anything to do with the closure because it came two years after he’d left. That’s the story he’s stuck with ever since – and especially this year, as national Democrats have taken up the GST story.
The point here isn’t that Romney was running Bain Capital and making all of its key decisions from 1999 to 2002. But the story he tells now absolves him of all responsibility for anything and everything Bain did in those years. ...Steve Kornacki, Salon
