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Bain Capital Horror Stories Continue to Haunt Mitt Romney's Campaign
By Caroline Bankoff
The double-edged sword that is Mitt Romney's career at Bain Capital will not stop causing image problems for the candidate. This time, it's a pair of articles chronicling the private equity firm's outsourcing of American jobs and methods for draining money out of the failed companies it controlled. The Washington Post has the former story, which reporters gleaned from Bain's Securities and Exchange Commission filings. While campaigning, Romney has frequently promised to bring jobs currently done by overseas workers back to the United States, but the filings show that Bain began investing in companies that specialized in outsourcing in the early nineties.
Bain’s foray into outsourcing began in 1993 when the private equity firm took a stake in Corporate Software Inc., or CSI, after helping to finance a $93 million buyout of the firm. CSI, which catered to technology companies like Microsoft, provided a range of services including outsourcing of customer support. Initially, CSI employed U.S. workers to provide these services but by the mid-1990s was setting up call centers outside the country.
Two years after Bain invested in the firm, CSI merged with another enterprise to form a new company called Stream International Inc. Stream immediately became active in the growing field of overseas calls centers. Bain was initially a minority shareholder in Stream and was active in running the company, providing “general executive and management services,” according to SEC filings.
By 1997, Stream was running three tech-support call centers in Europe and was part of a call center joint venture in Japan, an SEC filing shows. “The Company believes that the trend toward outsourcing technical support occurring in the U.S. is also occurring in international markets,” the SEC filing said.
More:
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/06/bain-horror-stories-continue-to-haunt-romney.html
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