Here’s another Mitt Romney Bain Capital video:
I’ve been checking this story out, and it appears to be all true. Basically: In 1989, while Mittens was CEO, Bain Capital bought a medical testing company called Damon Corporation. Bain took Damon public in 1991, and Mittens sat on the board of directors. Damon was sold to Corning in 1993 for a nice profit to Bain. Mittens personally made $473,000 on the deal, according to The Real Romney by Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman.
Very soon thereafter the sale it was revealed that Damon had been under federal investigation, and in 1996 Damon pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud. They’d been over-billing Medicare for unnecessary tests. Federal prosecutors say that the over-billing was going on from 1988 to 1993, during the entire time the company was owned by Bain. The feds credited Corning for helping out the fraud; no word about Bain.
Today Mittens said he didn’t know about the fraud, but when he was running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 he said that he had “blown the whistle” on Damon and had taken steps to stop the fraud. There’s no indication that Bain did anything except send some lawyers over to review Damon’s Medicare billing practices, which appears to have gone nowhere. In any event, no Bain executive, including Romney, was implicated in the fraud.
If Mittens is the nominee, I doubt this will be the last we’ll hear of the Damon Corporation and Labscam.
That’s one way to drown gov’t in the bath tub……
The story here is the oral gymnastics in which Mitt’s excels, talking out both sided of his two faces. (When two-faced demagoguery becomes an Olympic event, bet on Mitt for the gold – NEWT for silver.) You will never pin the Medicare fraud on Mitt, so that’s trivial. When it comes up, even though Mitt was on the Board of Directors, he will deny being at fault because he could not be involved in the day-to-day operations of the companies Bain owned. Fine.
But Mitt’s wants to take credit for every job those companies created for years after he left Bain. You can’t have it both ways, though Mitt’s will try. If Bain can disassociate themselves from criminal wrongdoing, because the companies Bain traded like tokens on a Monopoly board ran themselves as independent companies, the jobs created by those companies also had nothing to do with Bain.
A skilled presentation of that contradiction will go a long way. Mitt’s biggest fault is his two (or more) faces. Mitt’s has only one defense on this scandal – that Bain doesn’t manage their properties – which calls into question the excessive ‘management’ fees which are a major source of revenue for vulture capital firms. The more Mitt distances himself from the daily operations of the companies who survived Bain, the less credible are Mitt’s claim of credit for the success of those companies.
The right will say this was nothing compared to Obama and his cronies personal fortunes made in the Solyndra Teapot Dome Scandal.
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