Posted on 10/25/2012 7:31:05 PM PDT by Red Steel
CANTON, Mass. — Mitt Romney testified under oath in 1991 that the ex-wife of Staples founder Tom Stemberg got a fair deal in the couple’s 1988 divorce, even though the company shares Maureen Sullivan Stemberg received were valued at a tenth of Staples’ stock price on the day of its initial public offering only a year later.
At the time the Stembergs split, Romney suggested, there was little indication that Staples’ value would soon skyrocket.
Romney’s testimony in a post-divorce lawsuit brought in 1990 by Sullivan Stemberg was unsealed on Thursday in Norfolk Probate and Family Court at the Globe’s request. Sullivan Stemberg sued unsuccessfully to amend the couple’s financial agreement after Staples went public in 1989 and closed its first day of trading at $22.50 per share, 10 times the value she had received.
Stemberg left his wife in February 1987, and the divorce was finalized in July 1988. Before the official split, the couple negotiated an agreement in which Sullivan Stemberg got 500,000 shares of Staples stock, which Stemberg valued at $2.25 per share.
Sullivan Stemberg also kept the couple’s Dedham home, worth $690,000 at the time, and in February 1988 sold 175,000 shares of Staples stock at $2.25 per share to pay off the mortgage. She sold another 80,000 shares two months later, at $2.48 per share.
“In my opinion, that’s a good price to sell the securities at,” Romney, now the Republican nominee for president, testified in June 1991.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
She did take stock instead of cash, but then she went and sold half of it to pay her mortgage off. She is apparently still trying to find someone to blame for her bonehead decision that cost her millions.
So in his 1991 testimony, Romney confirms that in 1988 nobody had clairvoyant knowledge of what the stock price would be in 1989.
Shocking.
Yeah, she could have had Facebook stock instead.
/sarc
At the turn of the Millennium, my former employer’s stock was trading about $110/share. Within a year it was $1.60.
Through the employee stock plan, I bought 10% of my salary’s worth at that $1.60 price for 6 months, then later sold it for up to $24/share.
“Greedy capitalist”....heh, heh, heh.
“Sometime you get the Bear, sometimes the Bear gets you.”
It doesn’t appear that Romney had anything to do with establishing a value of the stock at the time of the initial divorce and property division. He testified after the fact when Mrs. Stemberg was attempting to overturn the initial settlement. While he was apparently a witness for Mr. Stemberg would not Mrs Stemberg have had her own expert witness testify to the value. It would be interesting to know what value her witness put on the stock. It was her burden to prove her case and obviously she did not convince the court.
If she just sold all of the stock rather than keeping some of it that is her fault, I would think.
There was literally nothing here...and it turns out this is post divorce rather than during the divorce.
Quite a fail on Alred’s part.
So she actually still had quite a few shares - which then jumped to being worth $5.5 million. I’m supposed to feel sorry for her for having “only” another $5.5 million at the end of all of this? She’s a victim?
And of top of that, she still ended up with $5.5 million more in value from the shares she still had not sold.
This is ridiculous.
Well, let’s see, I could have bought Sirius XM stock at 5 cents a share a while back. Today it is about $2.80. During the height of the financial meltdown I could have bought Ford stock at 99 cents a share. I eventually sold it for about $2.70. Hindsight is always 100%.
No more like a demo dumbass..
I saw the AP headline on this story an hour ago...
“No bombshell in Romney testimony”.
So there you go, from a very liberal source...
It was a dud. Allred really wanted the gag order lifted so she could put the ex wife on all the TV shows the next 2 weeks. They knew nothing in the testimony. Boston Globe and Allred got played.
That is insane! A year before IPO? Are they kidding or just idiots!?
Bingo! If Romney had said $10 a share she would only have gotten 100,000 shares. I guess she’s never been told to “buy low and sell high”. On top of that, stock is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. Just ask the dummies who bought into the FB hype.
So is she arguing that, if the shares were undervalued, she should have gotten fewer of them? Did anyone force her to sell the shares before the IPO? Also, an entire year before the IPO, it might be difficult for an insider to say how well the shares would be sold at. Did the Facebook guy foresee how poorly his IPO would go?
Hey...Trump should give the 5 mil to this ex-wife if Obama releases his school records
So this move by Allred frames the fact that Romney is a financial expert. Nice going, Gloria!
I’m having trouble here - her payoff was in shares of stock. They say Mitt undervalued them so she got 500K shares. If he had guessed right, would she have only gotten 50K shares? She got a percentage of the company and had the luxury of deciding whether she thought her ex was a good businessman or inept - she chose inept and she was married to the schlubb - Mitt was only friends....
This is SOOOOOO stupid.
The divorcee` gets 4 million (that she blows on lawyers to try to get more money) and gets half a million shares of stock, which she turns around and sells.
Then tries to claim 20+ years later that Romney had something to so with the stock being 'undervalued'?
LOL! OF COURSE the value of the price was low on the Staples stock compared to a year later....the company hadn't gone public yet!
But it takes her over TWO DECADES to bring it up!
Can anyone say 'liberal tool'? LOL!
She should have listened to the more contemporary analysts and bought Facebook instead. That would have been a real deal for her.
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