Follow the Money

Mitt Romney is said to have profited enormously by outsourcing American jobs to foreign countries. The accusation damages his credibility, especially because he prefers to remain silent about his finances.

Talk about strange stories: Sometime in 2001, former Christian Democratic Party Treasurer Walther Leisler Kiep discovered a million or so German marks in his bank account, and supposedly couldn’t recall when and where he got it. If you’re rich enough, you’re likely to lose sight over all of your various accounts. Who notices whether one has a million more or a million less in the bank?

Certainly not Mitt Romney, although he can lay claim to more than $250 million, all hard-earned cash from his time with the private equity firm Bain Capital. But just how long was he in charge there? Romney’s answers differ markedly from Securities and Exchange Commission records unearthed by the Boston Globe.

If you want to believe the millionaire, he hasn’t had anything at all to do with the Bain company’s operations since the beginning of 1999. Instead, his full time job was organizing the Olympic games in Salt Lake City during that time. If you want to believe the information uncovered by the Globe’s researchers, he was sole owner, CEO and president of Bain Capital until 2002.

Whether Romney broke all ties with Bain in 1999 or 2002 is of the utmost importance because it was during this period that he earned big money by outsourcing American jobs overseas. In other words, the corporations were saved at the expense of the employees who lost their jobs to foreign workers.

It’s an unpleasant accusation for presidential candidate Romney to face during these difficult economic times. And it’s not the first time they have been leveled against him: A few days ago, the magazine “Mother Jones” revealed that during Romney’s time as CEO of Bain, the company invested millions of dollars in Chinese companies that later profited enormously from the jobs outsourced from the U.S. to China.

Small wonder that Obama’s election team quickly made these accusations their own, describing Romney as the real job killer who on no account should be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office. And it’s an even smaller wonder that Republicans responded with a television spot calling Obama a liar.

If one takes a closer look at the SEC documents (as the Washington Post’s fact checker did), the SEC documents are far more subtle and show that at no time did Romney have an operative role in Bain Capital’s daily operations. On the one hand, the documents show Romney received no salary payments or similar remuneration from Bain. On the other hand, they show that Romney didn’t depart totally from Bain in 1999, and is therefore still responsible for Bain’s business operations and certainly in keeping with the type of deals in which he was involved before his departure.

Even if Romney succeeds in refuting this latest allegation, the secrecy surrounding his income tax returns continue to plague him as it continues to lend credence to the other allegations leveled by his critics. Why, for example, does he refuse to make more of his recent tax returns public as all his predecessors have done? And did he really, as the magazine Vanity Fair alleges, hide many of his investments away in tax havens like the Cayman Islands? It’s hard to characterize that as being patriotic.

Or perhaps, like Leisler Kiep, he just lost track of his countless millions.