{"id":184043,"date":"2012-08-23T21:24:00","date_gmt":"2012-08-24T02:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/08\/23\/pass-the-popcorn-39\/"},"modified":"2012-08-23T21:24:00","modified_gmt":"2012-08-24T02:24:00","slug":"pass-the-popcorn-39","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/08\/23\/pass-the-popcorn-39\/","title":{"rendered":"Pass the Popcorn\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i990.photobucket.com\/albums\/af27\/msaroff\/drama.gif\" style=\"cursor: pointer; float: right; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px;\" \/>Gawker has acquired a cache of nearly <a href=\"http:\/\/gawker.com\/5936394\">1000 internal documents detailing activities at Bain Capital<\/a>, and they appear to show some fairly arcane tax avoidance schemes used by Rmoney to hide income from the IRS:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: blue;\"><p>Mitt Romney&#8217;s $250 million fortune is largely a black hole: Aside from the meager and vague <a href=\"http:\/\/romneyfacts.com\/cjtk.php\">disclosures<\/a> he has filed under federal and Massachusetts laws, and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mittromney.com\/learn\/mitt\/tax-return\/main\">two years of partial tax returns<\/a>  (one filed and another provisional) he has released, there is almost no  data on precisely what his vast holdings consist of, or what vehicles  he has used to escape taxes on his income. Gawker has obtained a massive  cache of confidential financial documents that shed a great deal of  light on those finances, and on the tax-dodging tricks available to the  hyper-rich that he has used to keep his effective tax rate at roughly  13% over the last decade.  <\/p>\n<p>Today, we are publishing more than 950  pages of internal audits, financial statements, and private investor  letters for 21 cryptically named entities in which Romney had  invested\u2014at minimum\u2014more than $10 million as of 2011 (that number is  based on the low end of ranges he has disclosed\u2014the true number is  almost certainly significantly higher). Almost all of them are  affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney  co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, <a href=\"http:\/\/gawker.com\/5926134\/mitt-romney-retired-retroactively-from-bain-capital-whatever-the-hell-that-means\">depending on whom you ask<\/a>).  Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together,  they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity  with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance  schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him,  the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money  has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own  criticisms of Obama&#8217;s fiscal approach and his money managers&#8217; embrace of  those same policies. They also show that some of the investments that  Romney has always described as part of his retirement package at Bain  weren&#8217;t made until years after he left the company.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>H\/t <a href=\"http:\/\/www.americablog.com\/2012\/08\/this-just-in-gawker-gets-publishes-1000.html\">Americablog<\/a>, and the documents can be examined <a href=\"http:\/\/gawker.com\/5933641\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It also appears that it&#8217;s getting <a href=\"http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/Blotter\/bain-documents-romney-offshore-investments-blockers-avoid-taxes\/story?id=17067015\">coverage in the main stream old media<\/a> (ABC) as well.<\/p>\n<p>Heh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gawker has acquired a cache of nearly 1000 internal documents detailing activities at Bain Capital, and they appear to show some fairly arcane tax avoidance schemes used by Rmoney to hide income from the IRS: Mitt Romney&#8217;s $250 million fortune is largely a black hole: Aside from the meager and vague disclosures he has filed &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1017,1206,978,977,983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international-finance","category-mitt-romney","category-politics","category-presidential-campaign","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184043"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}