The Difference Between Running and ‘Running’ a Private Equity Firm

Dan Primack is all over the counter-narrative to the controversy surrounding today's Boston Globe story about how Mitt Romney, who claimed to have left Bain Capital in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics, was actually employed as Bain's CEO and sole shareholder until 2002.

Primack has the offering documents from a private equity fund Bain raised in 2000 that lists eighteen managers of the fund — the people who were making the direct decisions about what the firm invested in, and how much it invested. Romney's name isn't on it.

The distinction between what the Obama campaign is saying (that Romney lied about when he stopped running Bain Capital and therefore is responsible for decisions that led to the outsourcing of jobs post-1999) and the reality to be drawn from Primack's document stash (that Romney might have been “running” Bain Capital during that period, in a technical sense, but wasn't actively managing its investments) is a small but very important point that cuts to the heart of the way private equity firms are managed.

More here.