GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands — Eight years after then US presidential candidate John Kerry’s anti-tax haven rhetoric was blunted by the disclosure that he had participated in a Cayman Islands tax shelter scheme that even his own accountant said bordered on the illegal, Mitt Romney, the prospective Republican candidate in this year’s US election faces his own issues relating to activities in the Cayman Islands.
In an article entitled “The Bain Files: Inside Mitt Romney’s Tax-Dodging Cayman Schemes”, John Cook of the Gawker reports on more than 950 pages of internal audits, financial statements, and private investor letters for 21 cryptically named entities in which Romney had invested, many of them offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands.
Gawker has obtained a massive cache of confidential financial documents that shed a great deal of light on Romney’s finances, and on the tax-dodging tricks available to the hyper-rich that he has used to keep his effective tax rate at roughly 13% over the last decade.
“Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama’s fiscal approach and his money managers’ embrace of those same policies,” Cook writes.
The full set of documents can be read here.
