Did Mitt Romney Profit From Corruption, Fraud and Racketeering at Bain Capital?
Ed note: this post originally appeared at PoliticusUSA.
Over the past nine months, a question plaguing Willard Mitt Romney is when he left as CEO of Bain Capital due to conflicting state and federal SEC and FEC filing statements contradicting his retroactive retirement contention. It is pertinent to know why he fled Bain Capital in August 2001, and why he cited February 1999 as his official separation date when he was CEO the entire time. Organized crime figures develop elaborate schemes to avoid Department of Justice (DOJ) investigations and in Romney’s case it was Bain Capital’s bankruptcy fraud he was desperate to avoid.
MoveOn.org filed a complaint with the DOJ over Romney’s disclosure claiming he was 100% stock holder and paid Bain Capital executive in 2002 despite his contention left active management in 1999. The period between Feb 1999 and Aug 2001 is when Romney, Bain Capital, and their corrupt operatives conspired to commit bankruptcy fraud guaranteeing Bain Capital could plunder a company they managed with impunity.
To understand the level of fraud Romney’s surrogates committed in bankruptcy court, imagine a child custody battle between a powerful attorney and his ex-wife. The husband employs his firm to represent him, and surreptitiously supplies his partner to represent his ex-wife. When the mother discovers her ex-husband controlled his and her counsel, she reports the malfeasance to the court, and to avoid an investigation, her husband arranges to replace the prosecutor with one of his firm’s partners who pretends to investigate and then drops the case.
A similar scenario unfolded when Bain Capital took eToys into bankruptcy. Bain Capital’s secret law firm, MNAT, colluded with Romney’s bankruptcy gang bycommitting perjury to represent the debtors’ counsel and creditor’s counsel to give the appearance of being on opposite sides and conceal the fact eToys was not broke. Controlling both sides, Bain Capital’s corrupt gang colluded to plunder the company’s assets without opposition, and give Bain Capital eToys for free.
A 2005 Wall Street Journal article explained that eToys creditor’s attorney lied byfailing to disclose conflict of interest when he appointed his partner as CEO of eToys. The eToys bankruptcy trustee alleged the “failure to disclose is difficult to understand as inadvertent rather than deliberate,” and it transpired in other companies Bain Capital took into bankruptcy during the same period. Influencing the debtor and creditor’s counsel, Bain was assured their bust out scheme would be successful. However, when an eToys executive liquidating assets discovered the frauds, including the company may not be broke, he alerted eToys managers and attorneys who attempted to buy him off; he declined their offer and reported the corruption to the Department of Justice. It is about this time that Romney, fearing a Department of Justice investigation, fled Bain Capital by retroactively retiring back to February 1999 to conceal his involvement in the eToys corruption scandal.
Despite the fact that Bain’s secret law firms (MNAT and Paul Traub) admitted lying, there was no Department of Justice investigation into Bain Capital, Romney, or their surrogates’ fraud and perjury because in August 2001, George W. Bush nominatedanother MNAT partner, Colm Connolly, as Delaware United States Attorney. Consequently, as Bain Capital’s friend, he refused to investigate and/or prosecute the confessed acts of perjury and admitted intentional crimes.