Does It Matter When Mitt Romney Left Bain?

The best evidence right now suggests
that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney took a leave of absence
from Bain Capital in February of 1999 to help run the Salt Lake
City Olympics in Utah. During his leave of absence, Romney
continued to
sign documents submitted by Bain to the Securities and Exchange
Commission,
listed himself as the Chief Executive Officer of the company in
some of those SEC filings, and reportedly took a $100,000 annual
salary. There’s no evidence that Romney was involved in Bain’s
day-to-day operations, but he attended board meetings for companies
affiliated with Bain, and a Boston Herald report from the
time he started his absence — a report touted by the Romney
campaign —
indicated that Romney planned to “stay on as a part-timer with
Bain, providing input on investment and key personnel decisions.”
But the bulk of Romney’s time after he left was spent on the
Olympics, where he worked “12 hours a day, six days a week,”

according to a  Massachusetts state investigation.
The Bain team, meanwhile, worked on
transitioning Romney out of the top job and putting a new
management team in place.

Romney’s campaign insists that Romney left Bain in 1999, saying
that although Romney initially took a leave of absence, he
later “retired retroactively.” President Barack Obama’s
presidential campaign, on the other hand, seems to think that
questions about just exactly when Romney left Bain and what he did
there are a winning issue, at least in the sense of winning the
day: A
morning email sent out by the Obama team proposed a slew of
detailed questions about Romney’s time at Bain — and when,
precisely, it ended.

There are two issues here, and neither of them matter very much.
The first is whether Romney’s campaign is being truthful in
insisting that he actually left in February of 1999. On the
evidence, it looks like he phased full-time into Olympic work, but
continued to advise his old company and take a stipend

You can read the rest of this article at: http://reason.com/blog/2012/07/16/does-it-matter-when-mitt-romney-left-bai

Short URL: http://www.txwclp.org/?p=13114

Posted by rbutler on Jul 17 2012. Filed under Libertarian News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry