O.K.
So we can recount.
The Obama campaign runs an ad against Mitt Romney using the closure of the GST plant in Kansas City as it's foundation. In the ad, it clearly stated that Romeny screwed the company and then took off with profits leaving 750 people out of work.
What has been pointed out is that:
Bain took over GTS in 1993. (this has been reported and can probably be trusted)
The site was a dump (this is an observation.....calling something a dump is subjective).
Bain spent over 100 million on the plant (this was Bains claim as reported).
The site did undergo some significant renovation (an observation).
Bain held onto the company going into a small recession.
Romney exits Bain operations in 1999 to take over the Olympics.
GST goes bankrupt in 2001.
A lot of other steel plants went bankrupt in 2001.
Neither Romney nor anyone at Bain (that I have read about) has been prosecuted with respect to any wrongdoing at Bain in regard to GST.
Bain helped get another steel company started in 1994. That company grew and Bain sold off it's part of that company in 2000. Here is from an article:
"It normally takes two years to make a steel plant profitable," Busse recalled. "We didn't have two years. We were running out of money."
GE Capital (GE) was interested, but CEO Jack Welch told Busse he didn't want to fund the whole thing because it would be the biggest gamble GE had ever taken on a startup.
Welch brought in Bain, which investigated the project. Busse said he met with Romney. Bain liked the deal and invested $18.3 million.
"Their general strategy is to exit early," Busse said. Bain later sold its stake for $104 million, according to a 2000 prospectus from Deutsche Bank.
The private equity firm should have held on longer. Steel Dynamics went public in November 1996, finishing its first month of trading with a split-adjusted price of 4.56 a share. The stock reached a peak of 40.92 in June 2008 for a gain of 797%.
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Now, the GTS deal is being called a corporate raid by some on this board. Corporate raiders usually buy companies, hack them to bits and sell them off. They are harvesting. Holding onto a company for a long time isn't the trademark of a corporate raider.
If you look at Bain's returns on Steel Dynamics, you see they invested 18 million to make 104 million. That is the kind of return that these firms look for.
Here is a little tidbit:
Bain Capital is a financial services company that engages in investment management. Venture capital typically involves buying a small stake in a promising start-up company and trying to help it grow and thrive. Private equity deals focus on leveraged buyouts of companies that are under heavy debt or near bankruptcy, and restructuring the troubled company’s costs, operations, and assets, which can involve anything from streamlining a company’s decision-making process to cutting some jobs, while saving others.
The Wall Street Journal did an excellent piece researching Bain’s record under Romney’s tenure. The report found that Bain recorded roughly 50% to 80% annual gains on 77 deals while Romney was CEO from 1984-1999, which experts said was among the best track records for buyout firms during that era. Romney himself earned the bulk of his $200 million-$250 million fortune during these years. So not only did he do his job and do it well, but he was pretty successful at it too.
Now this image perpetrated by the Democrats of a Gordon Gekko-type corporate raider that liquidated companies for all they were worth and screwed “the little people” over is purely absurd. Romney and Bain were anything but. They were a thoroughly respectable investment management firm that successfully discharged its responsibility of earning high returns for its investors by deploying capital in companies privately rather than by buying shares in the public market.
Setting the Record Straight On the Bain of Mitt Romney's 2012 Campaign
On the other side.....they invest in GST (supposedly over 100 million which they apparently borrowed......in an effort to upgrade the plant) and they make back 16 million (they made 12 million through the early years, as I understand it and made 4.5 million in fees...that isn't profit). And the company goes bankrupt.
But, somehow they should have augered into bankruptcy with GST. Hint: that is how good businessmen stay good businessmen. They don't ride the bomb to the target.
One question that has been raised is the pension fund:
This from an anti-Romney blog:
[Romney’s] supporters say the pension gap at the Kansas City mill was an unforeseen consequence of a falling stock market and adverse market conditions. But records show that the mill’s Bain-backed management was confronted several times about the fund’s shortfall, which, in the end, required an infusion of funds from the federal Pension Benefits Guarantee Corp.
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To which I say so what ?
If Bain did something illegal (like stole the pension fund), then there should be no problem getting it fixed. A shortfall for a company that had been around for how long ? (most of those poor steelworkers in the ads show 30+ years experience.....did that shortfall show up on Bain's watch ?).
So, this is provide some kind of recap. I'll try to look it over to see what I left out.