You have to start with the premise that companies who were in the final stages of survival....often had a few bits of pieces of something worth saving. It might have been patents, property, a series of products or just trained personnel.
One of the negative stories from this era...is Singer Sewing machines, where some Asian guy came in and tried to bundle up all the sewing machine companies in Asia, Europe and the US. The speed in which he acted....was amazing. He’d take over a company and immediately start to parcel out real estate and the pension plan...then use the assets to buy another company, and so on. At some point, he owned the majority of sewing machine companies in the world. Then he announced he was buying the biggest Russian sewing machine company. He wanted New York banks to front the deal. They were totally prepared...then for some reason...sent a guy to Moscow to view the property. The New York bank rep found this dilapidated manufacturing company out in the middle of nowhere...where the security guard even questioned how it was worth a thousand bucks....let alone the $200 million that the bank was going to finance on the deal. At that point, the deal fell apart, and this Asian gentleman disappeared....with hundreds of millions that he made ripping off companies.
I should add....neither the Clinton or Bush or Obama camps have ever gone hunting for the guy....who broke various US laws.
I don’t see what the big deal is.. That is the nature of capitalism.. The weak dies and strong survives.. Far as I know Mitt did nothing illegal..