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A HEDGE FUND in which Republican US presidential candidate Mitt Romney is a major shareholder has reportedly routed €80 million euros in dividends though a tax loophole in the Netherlands using an Irish pharmaceutical company.
Romney officially left the hedge fund Bain Capital, which he helped to found, in 1999 but part of his severance package included the right to remain a shareholder, according to the Dutch newspaper Volksrant.
In 2004, Romney invested more than $1 million in the Bain Captial Fund VIII – a Cayman Islands-based fund worth approximately $25.7 million (€20.09 million) – which is a major shareholder in Irish pharmaceutical company Warner Chilcott, HedgeCo.net reports.
Romney reportedly donated 19,799 shares of Warner Chilcott to a non-profit organisation operated by his son in 2011 (shares were valued at approximately $450,000). According to the former Massachusetts governor’s tax returns, he and his wife Ann Romney also received over $2 million dollars in dividends and held $5.5 million worth of shares in the hedge fund during the 2010 – 2011 period.
In 2007, US Congress cracked down wealthy people using a popular tax shelter – known as the charitable remainder unitrust – which allowed individuals to take advantage of the exempt status of charities without actually parting with much money. However, those who had already set up such vehicles were permitted to keep them – and Mitt Romney was one such person.
Based on details of a 2007 tax filing, Bloomberg reports that Romney used the tax exempt status of a charity – the Mormon Church – to defer taxes for more than 15 years. (Generally, charities are not liable for capital gains taxes when they sell assets for profit.)
The Bloomberg report added: “At the same time he is benefiting, the trust will probably leave the church with less than what current law requires, according to tax returns obtained by Bloomberg this month through a Freedom of Information Act request.”
Romney campaign spokesperson Michele Davis commented on the matter, saying the trust has operated “in accordance with the law”.
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‘..in accordance with the law..’.
Canon or feudal?
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall
Damien, it simply means that he did not break a law. Would you go back to hibernation you clown and give us all a break. Read what is written and stop trying to make of it what you wish. “Feudal”,FFS
@Rory
Take a break.
Hey, break out altogether and have the craic.
And, dc, the difference is the thicknes of the wad you can pass to your corporate finance lawyer.
Anyone else think he’d do well in politics over here?
Only the little people pay taxes.
Damien, Rory’s correct. What he did may have been immoral, but it was still legal.
Would you really want to elect someone who pays more taxes than he needs to? Honestly? Would do well if he applied the same economic logic to the economy …
Would you really want to elect someone who pays less taxes than his secretary? He already pays less tax as his money comes from investments.
@doesnotcompute
Ta for making my point.
Don’t strain your chip. Lawyers, damned lawyers and statisticians.
@Damien Flinter
Would you pay more tax then you have to? If not then why should you expect anyone else to?
@Brian Callinan
Wrong question. The question is should Romney pay less(%)than the average worker?
Should the wealthy, who use publicly funded infrastructure and claim-jumped natural resources, magnified by the labour of the actual working producers, to make their wealth, pay less than those same workers who have no say as their tax is stopped at source and without negotiation?
What do you think?Is there such a thing as society?Is greed good enough to be the measure of all valuation?Was Thatcher right?
Well if you’re just going to avoid answering my question and then ask me another 6 progressively more vague questions then I don’t think I really want to engage in a debate with you to be honest.
I’m a libertarian so we’re probably not going to see eye to eye on very much here.
That said I agree with you that’s grossly unfair that the working class are taxed at source while the elite are able to avoid paying anything near the same tax rate..
Your solution to this is probably draconian and unworkable measures to force the elite to pay a higher share of taxes. Which will just drive them overseas leading to an even lower tax take.
Of course I believe in society, but not a society that has the threat of violence at it’s core. Give me over half of what you make or I’ll put you in prison, which is effectively the society we live in today.
All I’m proposing is that the ‘draconian’ restriction be reversed..so that the gluttons get restrained in order that everyone eat.
We already live under draconian conditions(an increasing number of us)and it is programmed to get worse so the obscenely obese(finacially) can expand until they burst the next bubble of speculative gambling. On which they wwill win through hedging their bets(hence hedge fund).
There is plenty. Its the controlled market that creates famine and want while spending your taxes on wars for more more more.
I’m bypassing your question because its framed at a micro level. It is the whole global macro model needs major overhaul. Otherwise, as you say, they offshore themselves like our exiles, who still dictate the draconian formuale of austerity for us while they sup champaigne in Davos Bilderberg and exotic secluded nooks.
Try http:www/treasureislands.org (you’ll get the book in Easons, Nicholas Shaxson). Big job. Lousy wages. Occasional good crack. Serious people. Sometimes too bloody serious.
Again your solution is more of the same, bigger government, more centralised control. I’m against socialism because I think it rewards bad behaviour by the rich and the poor.
I believe that the main reason our society is so messed up right now is because centralised government has the power to force the general population to prop up failing companies/banks and to guarantee the bets these people/institutions make. If these guarantee didn’t exist then there would never have been a banking crisis.
Better to have small banks fail often then big banks/ auto companies or whatever that are two big to fail without taking the entire economy down with it. Nothing has changed since the crash I agree with you that there are already new bubbles beginning to form and I believe that this due to government intervention distortion of the free market.
You’re right the controlled market is the worst of both worlds neither truly free nor state owned. So what we end up with is the state corrupting the free market and then blaming capitalism when it all goes tits up.
Are you advocating some sort of single world government in order to stamp out tax disparity between nations. As a libertarian I’m used to people calling my ideas completely unworkable but surely you can see that aside from that being unworkable if would be a disaster if it were to ever come to pass?
Thanks for the links…..I’ll check them out
Nope. Not bigger. We already have global government running the falsified economy in the interests of the mega-corporations who own us, right down to our pending budget, through their instruments like the Troika, WTO, IMF and World Bank. They have also taken over the UN forum and replaced it with Nato stealth mission-creep.
The job(as I see it) is to try to get a human handle on a global system now on automatic pilot(everything from nuclear early warning to Wall St trading is computerised).
The Bush/Cheyney oil/finance/military-industrial nexus just fired the starting-pistol for their masters’ PNAC rat-race to full spectrum dominance(totalitarian dictatorship of the corporatariat, including media, cyber and outer space).
This leverage, magnified exponentially by the GRAINN sciences(Genomics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience and Nanotechnology)have opened a set of challenges that require that we think globally and create a counter-program to their homicidal and suicidal(biocidal even, we are entered on the 6th great extinction, the last one being the dinosaur-exit)dog-eat-dog pre-human mindset programmed on a premeditated evangelical indoctrination of neo-conservative ideology. Its a mirror pravda. Curtains(iron or not)always have two sides.
Where we probably differ is that I would see Romney as just another stooge for these pin-striped pirates, and Obama as a POSSIBLE respite(provided the stays on a very narrow tightrope, which is unlikely).
You couldn’t make it up. A media publication and Irish people complaining about a tax loop hole being used by a man 1000′s of miles away while our own children and us are getting saddled with over €60,000,000,000 and not a mention or protest because of it. It’d be funny if it wasn’t such an indictment of the idiocy of our society!
Totally agree – until every problem in Ireland is sorted there is no excuse for any Irish media outlet to publish any non-Irish stories.
I mean, did you see all the coverage of the Sandy storm 3000 miles away while it was also lashing rain in Sligo?
Its a disgrace, what it is.
Not so many thousands of miles away at all, as the digital funds fly through the IFSC laundry chutes. Catch up.
Honeypie, they shrank the globe.
Don’t act so idiotic. It’s wall to wall coverage of the American presidential race while our own country gets flushed down the toilet by debt we never accrued! The American presidential race is important for the globe, however, it is not MORE important that the future of our country, a future ignored by journalists throughout Ireland who refuse to document bond payments or keep some resemblance of pressure on the govt, currently acting so treacherously while ensuring they get their own €4 million pension pot after they sign away the future of our country for the price of a pat on the head for Enda!
We need America to get better – where else are our kids supposed to go when the crooks still in power continue to rape the pockets of those at home, forcing our young to go elsewhere!
Gagsy that’s a pretty infantile comparison to be fair. It is true that bond payments are ignored by Irish media yet we hear what Obama and Romney have for breakfast! It’s pretty stupid when you document something in another country so vividly and yet ignore serious problems and issues at home eg. €60 odd billion we don’t owe?
You overestimate my thesbian skills.
And get planetary, if you are serious about being part of a possible solution rather than another nationalist cul-de-sac input to the problem.
Jaysus!
Bond payments ignored? Are you for real?
On the journal in particular the bank bail out topic has been done to death again and again. That and the HHC.
Even articles totally unrelated to the bank bail out become about the bank bail out (see?, its already happening here now!).
Call me weird but I like reading about different topics.
You’re weird! There I said it!
agreed.
@stopdebtpay, if you are some sort of campaign spokesperson, you might want to hone your message a little. Calling the people you want support from ‘idiots’ probably isn’t the most successful tactic…
Exactly where did we call someone an idiot? Have a look there now again. We called a response idiotic, massive difference there, sorry to disappoint you.
My mistake, there is a huge difference between calling someone who disagrees with you an idiot and calling them idiotic. Your subtle use of language is inspirational, best of luck with your, or is it ‘ye’re’ campaign.
@stopdebtpay
I couldn’t make it up. Being accused of idiocy by a genius who comes on with a rant about probably the most powerful single position on the electoral spectrum….because you make a comment on the topic.
The fact that Romney is the stooge of choice for Glodman-Sachs, AIPAC, Wall St and the military-industrial complex he is prepared to gift $2 trillion (while slashing taxes for the wealthy cronies) has nothing to do with the global economy we are exposed to like Sandy was a mild zephyr?Nothing to do with us?
If Carlsberg did idiocy, you’d take the brewery.
Gotta love those legal loopholes, who knows maybe Romney is a bondholder!
He could be facing charges very shortly on another matter: http://bigginsblog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/mitt-romney-faces-ethics-charges-for-profiteering-from-auto-bailout/
Mitt Romney, is likely face charges for ethics violations shortly for profiteering from the 2009 auto bailout initiated by the Obama Administration.
Jaysus, he’s like one of our own.
yup especially Bono,he probably gave him the advice
I’ve a better one for Romney.
Mitt-Moron-Mormon
Genius. This guy should run for president and by applying the same logic will have a countries deficit reduced in no time. Lol
“Canon” FFS
Yeah Rory, the laws of optics. Have you not seen their lenses?
No doubt Bono is his advisor
U2 “inc” is based in Holland and pays a lower corporate tax there, but what everyone seems to forget is that Bono does in fact personally pay income tax on his personal income in Ireland. He lives here….
Change the record!
According to a documentary aired last night, not only is he a Mormon, but he’s actually a bishop. Would this be the first time a bishop became a president?. I shudder at the thought.
Shocking timing :)
Obama to win popular vote Romey to win electoral college 50/1 paddy powers .Its tight .
10r down..
It’s not tight at all, Obama is well clear
I’d like to change the record but nearly every one I have has got Bono on it.
have your say