Bain Birth Pain

When W. Mitt Romney started Bain Capital in 1984 he had trouble raising money from old-money American families. So he had to look further afield. An article in the LA Times identifies some of the international investors who helped Mitt Romney get off the ground. They provided a third of the capital used to start Bain. These include:

• Sir Jack Lyons, a Briton who used a Panamanian shell company and a Swiss money manager to hide his identity. Lyons was convicted of stock fraud, had his knighthood stripped and only escaped prison because of his poor health.
• Salvadoran expatriots living in Miami. In one family, the de Solas, one brother was connected to right-wing death squads in El Salvador, while another is serving a prison sentence for fraud.
• Robert Maxwell, a British publishing baron, who after his drowning was discovered to have stolen hundreds of millions from his company's pension funds.

Some of Bain's initial investors were not so notorious: a Monsanto exec, a guy who started the Panamanian stock exchange and an ambassador.

These offshore investors used Panamanian shell corporations and secret bank accounts. These were notorious havens for tax evasion and drug money laundering scams during in the 1980s, when Romney was starting Bain. It was so bad that the United States invaded Panama in 1989 and captured its dictator, Manual Noriega, who had been on the CIA payroll since the 1950s. Noriega was jailed and convicted on drug charges. After serving a prison term in the US, he was extradited to France and then Panama where he's still in prison.

Republicans love to play the guilt by association game with President Obama, constantly linking him to Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers just because he had met them. But Mitt Romney's claim to fame, Bain Capital, was started in that shady underworld of secret foreign bank accounts and shell corporations. These people gave him millions of dollars. They got him off the ground.

What kind of influence will people like this have over Romney? Do they have information, which if released, would discredit him? Could they then use such information to blackmail him? These are exactly the kind of questions the FBI asks when people are considered for security clearances. When the FBI asks, you don't have a choice about answering. Has the FBI asked these questions?

Maybe this is another reason Romney he doesn't want to release his tax returns.