Mitt Romney could face new questions about his overseas investments after a campaign official acknowledged to NBC News that his campaign is revising his financial disclosure forms to report more than a half dozen offshore holdings, including income from a multi-million dollar Swiss bank account that were not disclosed last year.
First Read
Mitt Romney's campaign is amending the financial disclosure forms he filed in 2007 and 2011 to acknowledge that a Romney trust held a Swiss bank account, a detail that had been missing from both reports.
"An amendment is being filed to address this minor discrepancy," a campaign official told ABC News in an email Thursday in response to questions about the apparent omission.
ABC
Minor discrepancy?
Half a dozen accounts, at least one of which has multiple millions in it, and in both 2007 and 2011?
This is no minor discrepancy. This is Willard caught with his hand in the cookie jar, his pockets full of cookies, cookie crumbs piled 6" deep around his ankles, cookie residue smeared across his face like Santorum, and a 54' tractor-trailer rig delivering cookies backing into the driveway. I can't prove it, but I have no doubt that this is a deliberate omission to hide politically embarrassing investments.
More below the Orange Squiggle of Power.
Malt said he opened up the Swiss bank account, holdings in which are valued at between $1 million and $5 million, in 2003 on behalf the Ann Romney trust in order to provide “international currency diversification” for the trust's holdings. He then shut it down in early 2010, he said, and transferred the assets to the United States, noting that Romney was preparing to run for president at the time and he did not want to have it become an issue in the presidential campaign.
First Read.
Malt is the Romney's investment manager. He manages their "blind trust", which evidently is not very blind because publicly available documents describe what is in it. Does anyone seriously believe that the Romneys would be surprised to learn what was in their "blind trusts"?
Oh, and Newt wants to play fast and loose, too:
At the same time, questions from ABC News about undisclosed income that appeared on Newt Gingrich's tax return have led Gingrich to announce that he, too, will be amending his financial disclosure report. Gingrich's returns showed he received $252,500 in wages from Gingrich Holdings Inc. in 2010, but those wages do not appear anywhere on his presidential disclosure report.
"An internal account review found the need to amend the reporting," said a Gingrich campaign official. "It was done immediately."
ABC
And as noted above, it's not just the Swiss bank account with UBS.
But the inclusion of the Swiss bank account is apparently not the only revision. The Ann Romney blind trust also reported income from shares in offshore companies such as Barricuda Investments Ltd. in Ireland, Castle Garden Funding in the Cayman Islands, and Sankaty High Yield Assets Investors Ltd. in Bermuda. Those holdings also were not included in the financial disclosure form that Romney filed last August. The form requires presidential candidates to report all assets and income for them and their spouses for the full calendar prior to the year of the filing.
But Malt said there had been no attempt by the Romneys to conceal these investments, and all taxes on their earnings were fully paid. Malt stressed that the Ann Romney trust fund was simply a passive shareholder in the investments funds, which in turn owned shares in the offshore companies. He said the investing entities were like “mutual funds.”
First Read
No, there are no legal penalties for lying accidentally leaving something important off your disclosure forms. So this will not result in a joint Romney - Gingrich perp walk - alas.
What this shows is that Willard M. Romney will lie to you if he thinks it will help him. The man lies without compunction. And that goes for Newt, too.
If I had to vote for one of the remaining Republicans I might vote for Rick Santorum ... God help me. The two frontrunners are dangerous men who want power far too much.
One other point in passing - given that this was bound to blow up once his tax forms were released, shouldn't Romney have either released his taxes months ago, or waited a week? Once again we see the Romney campaign in a reactive mode, back on their heels, making unforced errors.