The document which cites Bain as a source

Mr. Romney had a particularly close involvement with one firm that flamed out, a maker of children's dolls meant to resemble moncler jackets their owners. Please see accompanying article.) Bain, citing privacy reasons, declined to provide a list of the companies it invested in. For its analysis, the Journal used a list of 77 Bain investments inked from 1984 through 1998 that were included in a document that a unit of Deutsche Bank AG circulated in 2000, while soliciting participants in a fund to invest with Bain. The document—which cites Bain as a source—appears to be the most authoritative available for Bain's activities, and says that the deals accounted for about 90% of the money Bain invested during that period. The Journal obtained updated information from a similar 2004 prospectus. The list focused on larger "private equity" investments—typically deals in which Bain took control of a business, or in some cases worked with another buyout firm to do so, aiming to improve the target business's performance. Deutsche Bank lumped into a single line all of Bain's investments of less than $2 million and those that were more of a venture-capital nature, which generally involved buying minority stakes in promising small companies such as Staples. Seventeen of the 77 private-equity targets filed bankruptcy petitions, usually Chapter 11 reorganization, or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain's investment. Of these, at least five clearly were still controlled and run by Bain at the time. In three other cases, Bain was a minority investor in a deal run by another buyout firm. In some of the remaining cases, Bain still held a small stake or had just sold out when the bankruptcy filing or shutdown occurred, while in other cases the trouble struck several years after Bain's exit. Academic research provides some basis to compare this performance. A study of buyouts by various firms globally found a 5% to 8% bankruptcy rate among target companies that were taken over from 1985 to 1999. However, this 2007 study, by Swedish academic Per Str?mberg, followed the target companies only until the buyout firm's exit, not until eight years after the investment as did the Journal. You can find the high quality of 2011 new arrival moncler jackets,moncler coats,moncler vest,moncler handbags.So companies that went public, then filed for bankruptcy a few years later, wouldn't have been counted as bankruptcies in the study. Another study looked at outcomes of buyout deals involving companies that were large enough to issue publicly traded debt. In deals from the early 1980s to late 1990s, roughly 15% to 20% of these target companies defaulted on bonds within seven years of the initial investment, while not necessarily filing for bankruptcy, said Hamid Mehran, who worked on the study. It was done in 2008 for the Bank for International Settlements. Mr. Mehran, a researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said the rate at which Bain's target companies ran into trouble at some stage "seems large." He said it could be explained by the preponderance, among Bain investments, of small companies, which tend to fail at a higher rate. Marc Wolpow, a former Bain Capital executive, said the frequency of trouble did indeed stem largely from the firm's strategy early on of investing in smaller, troubled firms it hoped to turn around. "I don't think you can hold Mitt out as a great investor per se," Mr. Wolpow said, "but he was an excellent CEO of an investment firm, and the results speak for themselves." Mr. Romney, previously a Bain & Co. consultant, became the first leader of Bain Capital when it was founded in 1984. He left in early 1999 to take charge of the financially faltering 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. His Bain tenure brought him a fortune that his campaign has estimated at $190 million to $250 million. Bain, after its initial focus on small firms needing capital, later shifted toward the potentially more lucrative business of leveraged buyouts—acquiring control of businesses by using investors' money amplified by debt. In such deals, a buyout firm tries to improve profitability by refocusing operations and cutting costs, a step that can include cutting the work force. Buyout firms seek to make money not only by eventually selling a business for more than they put into it, but also by extracting fees and sometimes dividends while they own it. A few investments produced spectacular profits, the documents show. A 1995 Bain investment of $6.4 million in eye-care concern Wesley Jessen VisionCare Inc. yielded a gain of more than $300 million, roughly a 46-fold return. But the fact that some of Bain's biggest winners later landed in bankruptcy court "is potentially damning evidence" that the firm left the companies in vulnerable shape, said Mr. Str?mberg, the Swedish academic. He said research shows that moncler jackets 2011 outlet buyout companies, on average, add value to their targets, but it is worrisome if that reverses within a few years. A potentially mitigating factor, he added, is that these bankruptcy filings tended to be clustered during the post-2000 economic downturn. One of these deals involved DDi Corp., an Anaheim, Calif., maker of circuit boards. Bain nearly quadrupled the money its investors put into DDi starting in 1996, turning a $41 million investment into $157 million of value within a few years, according to the 2004 prospectus. Bain merged DDi with another firm in which Bain also held a stake and took the combined company public in 2000. Bain then gradually sold most of its shares to the public or distributed them to its investors and to Bain partners. Mr. Romney personally sold $4.3 million of DDi stock from these distributions in May 2001, regulatory filings show. But DDi's performance deteriorated in the downturn after the tech bubble deflated. It reported a sharp drop in sales and in 2001 and 2002 cut its work force by 1,300 people, or 40%, to about 1,900 employees, regulatory filings show. DDi defaulted on some of its debt in late 2002 at a time when Bain still controlled two of its six board seats, and filed for Chapter cheap moncler 11 bankruptcy reorganization in 2003. DDi later emerged from bankruptcy and continues in business today, with a work force similar in size to what it had after the layoffs.