Mitt Romney said that one of the goals of his private equity firm, Bain Capital, was to acquire companies and “harvest them at a significant profit,” according to a video from 1985 uncovered by Mother Jones magazine.
The video was part of a CD-ROM from 1998 that Bain used to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the firm.
“Bain Capital is an investment partnership which was formed to invest in startup companies and ongoing companies, then to take an active hand in managing them and hopefully, five to eight years later, to harvest them at a significant profit,” he says in the video.
He continued: “We recognized that we had the potential to develop a significant and proprietary flow of business opportunities. Secondly, we had concepts and experience which would allow us to identify potential value and hidden value in a particular investment candidate. And third, we had the consulting resources and management skills and management resources to become actively involved in the companies we invested in to help them realize their potential value.”
In response to its release, the Romney campaign did not refute the validity of the video, defending the Republican nominee's business record and taking a swipe at the president.
"In addition to starting new businesses, Mitt Romney helped build Bain Capital by turning around broken companies, creating and saving thousands of jobs," Romney spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg said in an email. "The problem today is that President Obama hasn’t been able to turn around our economy in the same way.”
Romney has spent much of the race touting his work at Bain, saying he has the ability to create jobs. The Obama campaign and the super PACs that support him have attacked Romney on some of the company’s decisions to close factories and release workers.
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