Gawker and Bain and the Caymans

Gawker has an interesting headline up: “Inside Mitt Romney’s Tax-Dodging Cayman Schemes.” The gossip site also has released some 950 pages of material related to Mitt Romney’s investments, mostly having to do with Bain Capital. In Gawker’s own words: “Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his $250 million fortune.”

Most respectable publications maintain a fairly strict church/state division between the editorial side and the business side, and Gawker, a not very respectable publication, seems to do the same. Apparently, nobody thought to tell the boys on the Romney beat that Gawker Media is part of a shell company incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Gawker’s money lives in the same neighborhood as Romney’s money. Call it bipartisanship.
As John Cassidy relates in The New Yorker, Gawker’s finances are “organized like an international money-laundering operation.” For example:
Much of its international revenues are directed through Hungary, where [bossman Nick] Denton’s mother hails from, and where some of the firm’s techies are located. But that is only part of it. Recently, [Felix] Salmon reports, the various Gawker operations—Gawker Media LLC, Gawker Entertainment LLC, Gawker Technology LLC, Gawker Sales LLC—have been restructured to bring them under control of a shell company based in the Cayman Islands, Gawker Media Group Inc.

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/314853/gawker-and-bain-and-caymans-kevin-d-williamson