A person who worked for Mitt Romney at the consulting firm Bain and Co. in 1977 remembers him with mixed feelings. Mitt was a really wonderful boss, the former employee says. He was nice, he was fair, he was logical, he said what he wanted he was really encouraging. But Bain and Co., the person recalls, pushed employees to find out secret revenue and sales data on its clients competitors. Romney, the person says, suggested falsifying who they were to get such information, by pretending to be a graduate student working on a project at Harvard. (The person, in fact, was a Harvard student, at Bain for the summer, but not working on any such projects.) Mitt said to me something like We wont ask you to lie. I am not going to tell you to do this, but [it is] a really good way to get the information. I would not have had anything in my analysis if I had not pretended.

It was a strange atmosphere. It did leave a bad taste in your mouth, the former employee recalls.

This unsettling account suggests the young Romneyat that point only two years out of Harvard Business Schoolwas willing to push into gray areas when it came to business. More than three decades later, as he tried to nail down the Republican nomination for president of the United States, Romneys gray areas were again an issue when he repeatedly resisted calls to release more details of his net worth, his tax returns, and the large investments and assets held by him and his wife, Ann. Finally the other Republican candidates forced him to do so, but only highly selective disclosures were forthcoming.

Even so, these provided a lavish smorgasbord for Romneys critics. Particularly jarring were the Romneys many offshore accounts. As Newt Gingrich put it during the primary season, I dont know of any American president who has had a Swiss bank account. But Romney has, as well as other interests in such tax havens as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

To give but one example, there is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney. It could be that Sankaty is an old vehicle with little importance, but Romney appears to have treated it rather carefully. He set it up in 1997, then transferred it to his wifes newly created blind trust on January 1, 2003, the day before he was inaugurated as Massachusettss governor. The director and president of this entity is R. Bradford Malt, the trustee of the blind trust and Romneys personal lawyer. Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an excepted investment fund that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romneys wealth is even greater than previous estimates. While the Romneys spokespeople insist that the couple has paid all the taxes required by law, investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance, as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it.

Thats not the only money Romney has in tax havens. Because of his retirement deal with Bain Capital, his finances are still deeply entangled with the private-equity firm that he founded and spun off from Bain and Co. in 1984. Though he left the firm in 1999, Romney has continued to receive large payments from itin early June he revealed more than $2 million in new Bain income. The firm today has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million, hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers. Again, the Romney campaign insists he saves no tax by using them, but there is no way to check this.

Bain Capital is the heart of Romneys fortune: it was the financial engine that created it. The mantra of his campaign is that he was a businessman who created tens of thousands of jobs, and Bain certainly did bring useful operational skills to many companies it bought. But his critics point to several cases where Bain bought companies, loaded them with debt, and paid itself extravagant fees, thereby bankrupting the companies and destroying tens of thousands of jobs.

Come August, Romney, with an estimated net worth as high as $250 million (he wont reveal the exact amount), will be one of the richest people ever to be nominated for president. Given his reticence to discuss his wealth, its only natural to wonder how he got it, how he invests it, and if he pays all his taxes on it.

Ironically, it was Mitts father, George Romney, who released 12 years of tax returns, in November 1967, just ahead of his presidential campaign, thereby setting a precedent that nearly every presidential candidate since has either willingly or unwillingly been subject to. George, then the governor of Michigan, explained why he was releasing so many years worth, saying, One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show.

But his son declined to release any returns through one unsuccessful race for the U.S. Senate, in 1994, one successful run for Massachusetts governor, in 2002, and an aborted bid for the Republican Party presidential nomination, in 2008. Just before the Iowa caucus last December, Mitt told MSNBC, I dont intend to release the tax returns. I dont, but finally, on January 24, 2012after intense goading by fellow Republican candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Perryhe released his 2010 tax return and an estimate for 2011.

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The Murky World of Mitt Romney's Personal Finances