Friday, July 20, 2012

Bain Crap

This whole Romney stayed as CEO of Bain thing strikes me as a typical summer political story. Fine to cover but unlikely to result in much. It's obvious that he went an managed the Olympics and became governor of MA so he wasn't doing much at Bain. He had a figurehead title and maybe there are some issues with filings with the SEC but it's true that CEOs can be figureheads. How the two campaigns handle a fake scandal is potentially interesting, but it's mostly just what's wrong with politics today.

So today the Boston Globe wrote Romney kept reins, bargained hard on severance. I think the title is overstating things. There are a couple of interesting bits into Romney's character:

"Romney had expected to remain at Bain Capital for years. He initially rejected the idea of running the Olympics, recounting in his memoir, “Turnaround,” that “after fifteen years of effort, Bain Capital had become extraordinarily lucrative. How could I walk away from the golden goose, especially now that it was laying even more golden eggs?” To do so, Romney wrote, meant “I would walk away from my leadership at Bain Capital at the height of its profitability.”"

"At Bain, there would be significant upheaval in the immediate months following Romney’s departure in 1999. At least one partner worried that, in losing the founder — one who excelled at bringing in investors, not at finding the companies to invest in and overhaul — Bain might have trouble attracting money to its funds."

"“He’d created a lot of franchise value, and we were going to pay him for that,” [former Bain Capital partner Edward] Conard said. “We had a very complicated set of negotiations that took us about two years for us to unwind. During that time a management committee ran the firm, and we could hardly get Mitt to come back to negotiate the terms of his departure because he was working so hard on the Olympics.” Conard said Romney’s negotiating position was along these lines: “I created an incredibly valuable firm that’s making all you guys rich. You owe me.’ That’s the negotiation.”"

No comments: