Cannonshot: More about "The VerMITTler" and His Offshore Accounts

Cannonshot: More about "The VerMITTler" and His Offshore Accounts
Posted By Dave Emory On July 9, 2012 (6:56 pm) In News & Supplemental

COMMENT: For many years, we’ve used Lucy Komisar’s illu­mi­nat­ing research on the nefar­i­ous world of “Off­shore” finance and busi­ness. Although many of the areas that fea­ture busi­nesses cater­ing to this “Funny Money” are, in fact “off­shore,” the term refers to finan­cial repos­i­to­ries that per­mit cus­tomers to escape finan­cial scrutiny and account­abil­ity and, thereby, taxes.

Among the most active of these havens is the Cay­man Islands, where The Ver­MIT­Tler has parked many mil­lions of dol­lars. (“Ver­mit­tler” is the Ger­man word for “agent.” We’ve applied it as Mitt Romney’s nick­name. Later in this post, we will begin to see how appro­pri­ate this term is.)

On his Can­non­fire blogspot, Joseph Can­non gives us a wor­thy post afford­ing an overview of sev­eral recent sto­ries about The VerMITTler’s off­shore deal­ings. As we have seen, “off­shore” is as insid­i­ous as it gets–it is where ter­ror­ists, orga­nized crime syn­di­cates, transna­tional cor­po­ra­tions, intel­li­gence ser­vices and fas­cist con­spir­a­tors park their funds in order to escape taxes and the scrutiny of law enforce­ment and those they victimize.

A num­ber of arti­cles cited by Can­non indi­cate that just such sin­is­ter ele­ments lurk in the shad­ows of The VerMITTler’s off­shore finan­cial deal­ings. Read­ers are encour­aged to exam­ine these over­lap­ping sto­ries from The Nation, Van­ity Fair and Sky­danc­ing.

In con­nec­tion with this post, there are a num­ber of points that come to mind, including:

• The Ver­MIT­Tler con­tin­ues to be paid by Bain Cap­i­tal more than ten years after he left the firm. Why?
• The VerMITTler’s trusts don’t appear to be nearly as “blind” as they are rep­re­sented as being.
• One of the orig­i­nal investors in Bain Cap­i­tal was the late Robert Maxwell, who had strong con­nec­tions with Israeli intel­li­gence. (In the past, we’ve noted The VerMITTler’s links to Ben­jamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right-wing. The Maxwell asso­ci­a­tion with Bain may be part of the same polit­i­cal relationship.)
• The Poma fam­ily of El Sal­vador also counted among the orig­i­nal Bain investors.
• The Pomas–one of the 14 fam­i­lies that owned El Salvador–were promi­nent back­ers of the late Roberto D’Aubuisson.
• King­pin of the ARENA Party, D’Aubuisson presided over the death squads that blood­ied El Sal­vador on behalf of that country’s fas­cist own­ers and with direc­tion from ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence. (D’Aubuisson was nick­named “Blow­torch Bob” by U.S. acquain­tances because of his pen­chant for tor­tur­ing cap­tives with a blowtorch.)
• Lis­ten­ers seek­ing back­ground on the gen­e­sis of Latin Amer­i­can death squads and their links to inter­na­tional fas­cism and ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence are referred to AFA #15.
• The avail­able evi­dence sug­gests that Bain may well have served as a money-laundering vehicle.

“Bain, Rom­ney, Spooks and Death Squads” by Joseph Can­non; Can­non­fire; 7/5/2012.

EXCERPT: . . . The ques­tion before us is a sim­ple one: What is Bain? This post won’t offer a defin­i­tive answer, but it will offer a start­ing point to any­one who wants to research a star­tling pos­si­bil­ity: Bain began life as a money laun­dry for the CIA. . . .

. . . Dirty money. Let’s get back to the Nation piece. Here’s where things get really weird. (I’ve added para­graph breaks to aid readability.)

“Did Bain serve as a tax haven for for­eign crim­i­nals? As Shax­son explains, ‘Pri­vate equity is one chan­nel for this secrecy-shrouded for­eign money to enter the United States, and a fil­ing for Mitt Romney’s first $37 mil­lion Bain Cap­i­tal Fund, of 1984, pro­vides a rare win­dow into this.

One for­eign investor, of $2 mil­lion, was the news­pa­per tycoon, tax evader, and fraud­ster Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht, and drowned, off of the Canary Islands in 1991 in strange cir­cum­stances, after loot­ing his company’s pen­sion fund.

The Bain fil­ing also names Eduardo Poma, a mem­ber of one of the ‘14 fam­i­lies’ oli­garchy that has con­trolled most of El Salvador’s wealth for decades; oddly, Poma is listed as shar­ing a Miami address with two anony­mous com­pa­nies that invested $1.5 mil­lion between them.

The fil­ings also show a Geneva-based trustee over­see­ing a trust that invested $2.5 mil­lion, a Bahamas cor­po­ra­tion that put in $3 mil­lion, and three cor­po­ra­tions in the tax haven of Panama, his­tor­i­cally a favored des­ti­na­tion for Latin-American dirty money—’one of the filth­i­est money-laundering sinks in the world,’ as a US Cus­toms offi­cial once put it.” . . .

. . . . Even­tu­ally, ARENA came to power in 1988, and insti­tuted a mur­der­ous cam­paign against left­ists, intel­lec­tu­als, priests and nuns; the party ruled with the prover­bial iron first for two decades.

Accord­ing to a 1985 CIA intel­li­gence assess­ment, “Behind ARENA’s legit­i­mate exte­rior lies a ter­ror­ist net­work led by D’Aubuisson hench­men and funded by wealthy Sal­vado­ran expa­tri­ates resid­ing in Guatemala and the United States.” One of the pow­ers behind ARENA was and is bil­lion­aire Ricardo Poma, a rel­a­tive of Eduardo, listed above. Ricardo runs the Grupo Poma, which owns much of El Sal­vador. From Wikipedia:
Ricardo Poma is a close friend of Mitt Rom­ney and was an early investor in Bain Capital.

From a speech that Rom­ney gave in 2007:

“I owe a great deal to Amer­i­cans of Latin Amer­i­can descent. When I was start­ing my busi­ness, I came to Miami to find part­ners that would believe in me, and that would finance my enter­prise. My part­ners were Ricardo Poma, Miguel Due­nas, Pan­cho Soler, Frank Kar­don­ski, and Diego Ribandinarea. . . .”

Article taken from Spitfire List - http://spitfirelist.com
URL to article: http://spitfirelist.com/news/cannonshot-more-about-the-vermittler-and-his-offshore-accounts/