PBS NewsHour: Romney's own side investments at Bain might be why he won't release tax returns

Last edited Thu Jan 19, 2012, 10:54 AM - Edit history (2)

From Judy Woodruff's interview with the Boston Globe's Michael Kranish (co-author of the book The Real Romney):

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june12/romneytaxes_01-18.html

The Globe has asked Romney for his tax returns really for almost two decades on a regular basis, whenever he's run for public office, and he's always refused. So it's an issue that has been around for a very long time. There's a saying in politics about get it out, get it out early. In this case, he's kept it private, hasn't released it.

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For our book, I looked into the 15 years of deals at Bain Capital. And it's very hard to determine how some of those deals worked for Mitt Romney personally because we don't know what his exact personal profit was. So, for example, there's a deal I write about at a very secure company where one of his partners said Mitt may personally have made as much as $40 million.

That's the kind of thing that you would know best from a tax return, because not only did Bain Capital invest, but, at Bain Capital, partners were allowed to make what's called side investments. So if you liked a deal you were doing with the investment group and the fund, you could also take your own personal money and co-invest it in a sort of parallel investment.

That's the kind of thing you would only know about from a tax return. So there may be all sorts of really interesting answers about specific companies that Romney himself personally profited from, and you could then link those to what happened to those companies. Were factories closed at those companies? Were jobs lost or created? You could do that much more of a transparent look at what Romney did and how he personally profited at those companies.

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