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That’s the same gimmick Romney used to profit off of surrogate companies even when they went bankrupt most of the time. Normally a company’s assets get claimed for the creditors in a bankruptcy, but since Romney transferred those assets to Bain ahead of time, the creditors got stuck with the bill, and sometimes the taxpayers when government pension insurance bailed out the pension funds.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/04/us/politics/04bain.html?pagewanted=all

Bain and its co-investors extracted special payments of over $100 million from each company, enabling Bain to make a healthy profit even before re-selling the businesses — a practice known as “getting back your bait.” Lenders say Bain is one of the firms that has taken the most in such payments, which companies usually make by taking on additional debt.

Mr. Romney, who remains an investor in Bain Capital, said he had not been involved in those decisions but acknowledged that such payments became part of the buyout business “very early on.”

“It is one thing that if I had a chance to go back I would be more sensitive to,” Mr. Romney said. “It is always a balance. Great care has got to be taken not to take a dividend or a distribution from a company that puts that company at risk.” He added that taking a big payment from a company that later failed “would make me sick, sick at heart.”

Warren E. Buffett, the legendary investor, has derided private equity firms as “deal flippers” who do little to increase the real value of their targets, profiting from rising prices driven in part by their own deals and by charging their acquisitions “fees, fees, fees.”