Republican US Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who has been building his foreign policy program around avowedly fault-finding rhetoric regarding Russia, invested last year in Russian natural gas, banking, and IT stocks.
According to his 2011 tax return released on September 21, the GOP nominee used some of his earnings from the politician’s former employment at Bain Capital, a sizable Boston-based PE firm, to buy $14,700 worth of Sberbank, Russia’s largest savings bank, $11,100 worth of Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly, and $11,250 worth of Yandex, the leading Russian-language search engine.
Making a considerable profit on the Gazprom shares and exiting Sberbank with just a minor loss, Mitt Romney obviously put his foot in it regarding Yandex. He bought into the IT firm in June 2011 following the Yandex IPO but then had to dump the stock between August and November, as the campaign season was already heating up, at a nearly 40% loss.
Romney also slipped up in his investment in China’s Tencent, one of the shareholders of Mail.ru Group, a leading Russian portal and webmail service.
Romney’s Russian investments have raised lots of eyebrows across the American and international political spectrum, questioning whether the well-heeled politician with a reported $200 million purse strings is as good as his words. Following the release of his tax return, he immediately got under fire for acting counter to his 2007 declaration that a statesman’s “investment must be in accordance with his political convictions,” and for having invested in what the GOP’s most outspoken hawk publicly branded twice this year as the U.S.’ “number one geopolitical foe” that seeks to campaign to hurt American interests, thus chipping away at Democratic President Obama’s political “Reset” with Russia.
