"US election: Mitt Romney may have breached ethics laws through company linked to Paul Ryan's brother."
Mitt Romney may have breached state ethics laws as Governor of Massachusetts by holding a stake in a company that did lucrative work for his administration and was linked to the family of Paul Ryan, a Daily Telegraph investigation has found.
This news cycle only get's stranger. Sunday's
The Telegraph has a great article
at
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/...
Paul's brother Tobin worked at Bain and eventually and spun out with another Bain employee to found Imaginitas, with a 5 million investment from Bain Capital, controlled by Mitt Romney. It did systems work of some sort for DMV departments, among other work. Made political contributions.
That company had business with the state of Massechusettes after Romney was elected Governor. It also had business with Minnesota, where Paul Ryan was a politician. Romney may not have disclosed his interests in this business when it got large contracts.
People should know that Tobin Ryan was part of Bain, same as Romney.
Tobin and partners made a lot of money when it was sold off to Bitney Bowes, for about 250 million dollars. See the article for questions raised by The Telegraph. Shocking.
Implications are that Romney (and possibly Ryan) threw business to Imaginitas, without disclosing his interest in it at the time it was set up, nor if he had retained interest in it at the time of the contracting. Also, did this company serve as a conduit for raising campaign contributions to Republican governors?
Additionally, it indicates how the political types have their tentacles into the machinery of DMV departments -- which may, or may not, have some influence on state ID's and subsequent voter registration processes.
The company just settled a four year lawsuit about putting privately placed advertisements in the official state notices sent out by the Mass DMV department.
This gets so strange. It is very late for me, perhaps someone can make more sense of this for a better diary tomorrow morning .. My head is starting to hurt with the spiral of bad information.