Gawker publishes trove of documents on Romney investments, many of them offshore and tied to Bain

Gawker's John Cook with what appears to be a big scoop:

Today, we are publishing more than 950 pages of internal audits, financial statements, and private investor letters for 21 cryptically named entities in which Romney had invested'at minimum'more than $10 million as of 2011 (that number is based on the low end of ranges he has disclosed'the true number is almost certainly significantly higher). Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, depending on whom you ask). Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama's fiscal approach and his money managers' embrace of those same policies. They also show that some of the investments that Romney has always described as part of his retirement package at Bain weren't made until years after he left the company.

These documents are just coming out now, so the process of analyzing what they mean is just beginning, but you can view them all here. According to Cook, the Romney campaign has not responded to requests for comment.

10:20 AM PT: Cook flags something interesting: Romney's retirement package includes investment funds that weren't created until years after he claimed to have retired. One such fund was created in the summer of 2002; another in 2008. Romney's claim that he had no involvement with Bain after February, 1999 has already been thoroughly debunked, and these documents once again underscore that Romney's involvement in Bain continued long after he claims.