Financial disclosure forms Romney filed in Massachusetts indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain “executive” in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings.
In addition, Bloomberg news service reported Friday, Romney is named as one of two managing members of Bain Capital Investors LLC in annual reports filed in Massachusetts as late as 2002, “adding a new corporate entity to a growing number of Bain-related investments and funds that list the Republican presidential candidate as controlling the company three years after he said he left it.”
On the day after Romney took over the Winter Olympics, the Boston Herald reported that “Romney said he will stay on as a part-timer with Bain, providing input on investment and key personnel decisions.”
On July 19, 1999, a news release about the resignation of two Bain Capital managing directors describes Romney as CEO and “currently on a part-time leave of absence to head the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee.”
Romney is quoted in the release from Regan Communications of Boston as saying, “While we will miss them, we wish them well and look forward to working with them as they build their firm,” language that suggests he was still involved in Bain personnel matters.
A Harvard Business School bulletin from October 1999 reported that “Romney is currently on leave as CEO of Bain Capital” and not that he had “retired” from Bain. In a November 2000 interview with the Globe, Romney’s wife, Ann, said he had been forced to lessen, but not end entirely, his involvement with Bain Capital.
It was not until August 2001 that Romney announced he would not return to full-time management of Bain Capital at the conclusion of the Olympics.
Until then, Romney planned to pick up where he left off, just as he had after two previous leaves of absence — one from 1991 to 1992 to save Bain and Company from near-bankruptcy and another from late 1993 to 1994 to run for US Senate.
“When I left my employer in Massachusetts in February of 1999 to accept the Olympic assignment,” Romney testified before the state Ballot Law Commission on June 17, 2002, “I left on the basis of a leave of absence, indicating that I, by virtue of that title, would return at the end of the Olympics to my employment at Bain Capital, but subsequently decided not to do so and entered into a departure agreement with my former partners.”
Romney also testified that “there were a number of social trips and business trips that brought [him] back to Massachusetts, board meetings” while he was running the Olympics. He added that he remained on the boards of several companies, including the Lifelike Co., in which Bain Capital held a stake until 2001.
Romney’s lawyer at the hearing said that Romney’s work in the private sector continued unbroken while he ran the Olympics.
“He succeeded in that three-year period in restoring confidence in the Olympic Games, closing that disastrous deficit and staging one of the most successful Olympic Games ever to occur on US soil,” said Peter L. Ebb from Ropes & Gray.
“Now while all that was going on, very much in the public eye, what happened to his private and public ties to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? And the answer is they continued unabated just as they had.”
