Undeterred by Romney's denial press junket-palooza on Friday, the Boston Globe is pushing back on Romney's claim that he had no active involvement in Bain or any Bain entity after February of 1999.
One article goes through the list of contradictory statements by Bain, Mitt Romney, Ann Romney, and Romney's lawyer that suggest active involvement in that 1999-2002 period. These items should be familiar to avid readers of Daily Kos in recent days. You know, all the stuff that any competent interviewer would have pressed Romney on yesterday.
Account of Romney's Bain departure has evolved - Conflicting evidence on his role after 1999
But until his run for governor — and even before that campaign was underway in earnest, when he needed to prove sustained connections to Massachusetts in order to ward off a ballot challenge — Romney had characterized his departure from Bain Capital more as a “leave of absence” in which he would be a “part-timer,” and not as an absolute separation from the thriving business he built and solely owned.
It was not until 2002 that Romney finalized a severance agreement with Bain, a 10-year deal with undisclosed terms that was retroactive to 1999.
Romney’s own words, along with other documentary evidence, appear to challenge his campaign’s assertion in a recent financial disclosure that Romney had “retired” from Bain in 1999 and “since February 11, 1999, Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way.”
The Globe also has another article going into detail on Romney's continuing involvement with Lifelike Co., a Bain investment, beyond February 1999.
Mitt Romney position undercuts Bain claim - Served on board of company tied to firm until ’01
Now the small, defunct business has grown from an odd blemish on Romney’s financial career into a political headache for the presumptive GOP nominee for president. It is among the pieces of evidence that undermine Romney’s claim that he did not participate in Bain Capital investing activities after 1999.
Romney served on the Lifelike board from its founding in the mid-1990s until 2001, according to the former governor’s financial disclosure forms and other public records. Romney described his responsibility as a board member in his testimony in 2002 before a state panel considering a challenge to his eligibility for the ballot.
There's an interesting capper to the story once Romney and Bain were out of Lifelike involving Mitt's brother-in-law, Roderick Davies.
With Romney and Bain gone, the company’s death spiral accelerated. Davies — the brother of Romney’s wife, Ann — was given the job of moving all of Lifelike’s operations to China and setting up a new corporation in Bermuda to assume ownership.
The old China/Bermuda two-step. Why does this all sound so familiar? Davies, by the way, later became the subject of a lawsuit by the company.
Apologies if either direct link hits a paywall. I found the articles through Google News and had no problem, so my suggestion is to enter that way.