Many Americans might react with a shrug to the idea of shady foreign money such as Robert Maxwell’s being invested here. But, says Rebecca Wilkins, of the Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit Citizens for Tax Justice, “It is shocking that a presidential candidate should think that is O.K.”
That is damning, isn\’t it? Robert Maxwell invested in one of Mitt Romney\’s funds.
There is absolutely no evidence that Bain has done anything illegal, but private equity is one channel for this secrecy-shrouded foreign money to enter the United States, and a filing for Mitt Romney’s first $37 million Bain Capital Fund, of 1984, provides a rare window into this. One foreign investor, of $2 million, was the newspaper tycoon, tax evader, and fraudster Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht, and drowned, off of the Canary Islands in 1991 in strange circumstances, after looting his company’s pension fund.
Umm, you mean he made this investment 7 years before anyone knew he was a fraudster? In fact, given that he looted the pension funds towards the end, before he actually was a fraudster?
Not that we\’d expect much different from Shaxson: a series of insinuations which add up to not very much at all.
Erm. Everyone who was paying attention knew he was a crook by the early 1980s, as exposed repeatedly by Private Eye.
This “secrecy-shrouded foreign money” comes in through a fund that publicly discloses its investors?
Not only Private Eye, but the Department of Trade and Industry, which famously declared in 1971 that Maxwell was “unfit to hold the Directorship of a public company”. So his 1984 commitment to Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital Fund was not “seven years before anyone knew he was a fraudster” but thirteen years afterwards.