Madoff Only Stole Billions Not A Whole Country

Bernie Madoff stole Billions but he didn't steal a Country and possibly TRILLIONS. Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney, his wife, son Tagg and brother G. Scott Romney are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 7. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the United States. This could be the biggest crime in history.

Please sign our petition here at WhiteHouse.gov to call on AG Holder to investigate the connection between the Romneys and Hart Intercivic.

Read: Tagg Team: The Romney Family Recipe for Crony Capitalism

In Lee Fang's article in The Nation, he explains in detail how Solamere and its partners are inextricably tied to a Mitt Romney’s victory.

Here are some excerpts:

The Scooter Store

Marc Leder, a wealthy investor, played host to Mitt Romney last May (where the secret video tape was recorded) at a private fundraiser at his $4 million home in Boca Raton. Leder, whose Sun Capital firm bought a stake in the Scooter Store last year. The company, known for its ubiquitous television ads promising seemingly free motorized wheelchairs for Medicare beneficiaries, has struggled as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that governs the programs, implements rules to curb rampant billing fraud. As a CMS report noted last year, 80 percent of the claims for scooters and power wheelchairs did not meet Medicare requirements, meaning that $492 million a year is being improperly spent.

A Romney administration, for example, would have a role in the fate of a recently launched pilot program ensuring that patients see a doctor face to face to determine if a Medicare scooter is medically necessary—a program that has reportedly already reduced billings to the Scooter Store. Another challenge for the company is Section 3136 of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act. If Romney wins and repeals significant portions of the ACA, would he retain this provision, which compels Medicare to have a competitive bidding process for motorized wheelchairs?

Solamere

Solamere, a firm predicated on its founders’ relationship with Romney, presents a channel for powerful investors to influence the White House if he wins. Private equity executives looking to lobby a Romney administration may very well have a leg up if they are already doing business with the firm that the president created for his son, Tagg.

The looming conflicts range from general matters that affect all private equity firms—such as tax changes or the new rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill—to more specific concerns relating to businesses owned or controlled by Solamere’s partner firms. Many of these businesses, in fact, depend on government contracts; indeed, some have been accused of fleecing taxpayers (which is ironic given that many private equity titans claim to support Romney for his unabashed belief in small government and free enterprise). A Romney administration could directly affect the profitability of these companies—and, by extension, potentially the success of Tagg’s venture.

“It’s absolutely a conflict of interest,” says Adam Smith, the communications director for the group Public Campaign, which works on issues concerning money in politics. “Romney can’t un-know that his son’s investment company could benefit financially from his policies. And the other investors—many of whom are likely Romney campaign donors—will have extra access and influence in a Romney administration.”

Private Equity Owned Dental Firms

Meanwhile, HIG Capital—one of the largest Solamere partners, with nearly $10 billion of equity capital—owns a number of other firms that are closely monitoring the federal government. One area where private equity firms have made lucrative investments is the new industry of dental management companies that bill Medicaid. In November 2011, Senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Max Baucus of Montana opened an investigation in response to allegations that these corporate-controlled dentists have abused children. As PBS’s Frontline reported, several private equity–owned dental management firms have illegally coerced dentists to perform unnecessary and expensive procedures on low-income children, because Medicaid will reimburse such work. The scandal has provoked a flurry of congressional activity, as well as legislative reforms at the state level. In North Carolina, for example, the legislature debated a highly contentious bill that sought to curtail the ownership of dentists’ offices by private equity firms.

HIG Capital, betting that it could beat the controversy, purchased the dental management firm InterDent for an undisclosed sum in August of this year. InterDent hasn’t been named in the current fraud investigation, but the company has been implicated in other ethics problems in the past. In 2008, InterDent signed a corporate integrity agreement after it was caught overbilling the government at some of its offices in California. This year, the company provided $50,000 for an effort to lobby legislators against the dental management reform bill in North Carolina.

Making Billions off Taxpayers and Veterans

It’s already clear how the Solamere nexus of influence would work to advance such companies under a Romney administration. Romney has voiced his support, for example, for expanding federal aid to proprietary colleges, which have been cited for waste, fraud and abuse, not to mention rising levels of student debt—and the for-profit college he has singled out for praise on several occasions is directly linked to Solamere.

Asked about the rising cost of colleges at a town hall event in New Hampshire in December 2011, Romney said that students should take a look at for-profit colleges like Full Sail University, a career college for the entertainment and production industry. Weeks later, in an interview with the Ames Tribune, Romney hailed the “advent of for-profit institutions of higher learning” for providing competition with public and private universities. He again volunteered Full Sail University as a good example of how students can “hold down the cost of their education.”

What Romney neglected to mention is that Full Sail University—in fact the third most expensive college in the United States—is owned by TA Associates. Indeed, TA Associates has viewed the for-profit college industry—a $40 billion market where 85 percent of the funds are supplied by taxpayers—as an excellent opportunity for growth. The firm has invested in other for-profit colleges, including the Rocky Mountain School of Design, the Los Angeles Film School and Vatterott Educational Centers Inc. Like most profit-driven colleges, which account for only 10 percent of all students but about half of all loan defaults, TA Associates’ schools do not boast a stellar track record. Leaked documents for Vatterott show that recruiters were instructed to use “pain” when targeting students—who, the recruiters are told, decide on college “based more on emotion than logic.” Within three years of dropping out or graduating, 26.6 percent of Vatterott students default on their loans.

Romney would have the ultimate power, through his Education Department, to decide if the current loopholes in federal lending policy continue to benefit for-profit colleges regardless of their track record. The Romney campaign’s education policy outline already makes clear that he would roll back the few regulations requiring for-profit colleges to demonstrate that a percentage of their students are able to find jobs after graduation as a basis for receiving aid.

He would also have the power to rescind President Obama’s recent executive order limiting for-profit college recruitment at military bases. Summit Partners, a Solamere private equity fund, owns Trident University, a for-profit college that targets veterans. “The fact that Mitt Romney praised an overpriced, underperforming college that is owned by his son’s investment partners, and whose owners have contributed a quarter-million dollars to his campaign and Super PAC, shows how he embodies the corrupting influence of money on politics,” asserts David Halperin, a college affordability advocate and attorney who has covered the for-profit industry for years. “It shows how his administration could, as a matter of course, allow special interests—the interests of his rich friends—to skew important policy decisions and harm the public interest.”

Possible Tax Evasion

It seems that Tagg has taken after his father, whose former firm Bain Capital also uses these offshore structures. Most of the offshore entities do not have to file a tax return in the US or anywhere else in the world, making them an ideal shelter for Solamere’s investors, says Wilkins. “To me, the most egregious part of this is that they’re facilitating tax evasion.”