Signs are Pointing to Obama Campaign having Dirt on Romney Finances

[Swede Atlanta]

69. Several of the investments were made or moved into blind trusts in his wife's name....

This from Wikipedia on blind trusts:

A blind trust is a trust in which the fiduciaries, namely the trustees or those who have been given power of attorney, have full discretion over the assets, and the trust beneficiaries have no knowledge of the holdings of the trust and no right to intervene in their handling. Blind trusts are generally used when a settlor (sometimes called a trustor or donor) wishes to keep the beneficiary unaware of the specific assets in the trust, such as to avoid conflict of interest between the beneficiary and the investments. Politicians or others in sensitive positions often place their personal assets (including investment income) into blind trusts, to avoid public scrutiny and accusations of conflicts of interest when they direct government funds to the private sector.

I believe at least one of these trusts were set up immediately before he took office as the governor of Massachusetts.

The interesting thing about these are that (a) trusts are private and (b) even though the beneficiaries have no legal control over the assets (i.e. they cannot legally force the trustee(s) to do x or y, they may still have the ability to exert significant influence over the trustees, depending on who they are.

So the trustees could be a son, daughter, business associate, etc. where there was a pre-agreement (verbal of course) on how the trustee would behave. This is very unethical in the context of fiduciary law but we all know it happens.