Like father, like son. Only worse.

I’m a firm believer that you can tell a lot about a parent by looking at their kids. In the case of Tagg Romney, eldest son of Mitt Romney, the story is very telling.

Yesterday, when asked how he felt about watching President Obama go after his father during the last debate, Tagg Romney said he wanted to, “jump out of [his] seat and … to rush down the debate stage and take a swing at him”.

Victims of an $8 billion Ponzi scheme run by Tagg’s business associates, however, may want to take a swing at him.

The Nation magazine reports that the private equity firm run by Tagg Romney, Solamere Capital, invested heavily in a Solamere Advisors, a group he helped to start. Not only that, Solamere Capital lied to journalists about their involvement when asked directly about it.

The private equity firm run by Tagg Romney—Mitt’s eldest son, who is now taking a leadership role in guiding his father’s presidential campaign—misled reporters last year about its involvement with a company run by men accused of taking part in a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Last year, I reported that Tagg had formed a business partnership with several North Carolina investors who are still facing a lawsuit for receiving bonus pay for selling CDs as part of the $8 billion Stanford Financial Group Ponzi scheme. In a nutshell, Tagg helped these investors form a company—called Solamere Advisors, a nod to Tagg’s firm Solamere Capital—shortly after their boss, Allen Stanford, was caught by law enforcement for his elaborate Ponzi fraud. When I interviewed him in Las Vegas, Tagg told me that his associates were “cleared” of any wrongdoing associated with the Stanford Ponzi scheme. Court documents directly contradict Tagg and show that the lawsuit has not been dismissed.

The piece, authored by journalist Lee Fang is worth reading. It shows a pattern of deception and lies coming from Tagg Romney’s firm, apparently an effort to shield his father (and his father’s presidential bid) from any and all connections with scandal. As it turns out, however, Mitt Romney himself invested heavily in Solamer Capital and, by proxy, in Solamere Advisors.

Mitt Romney’s main argument in this election is that he has the business acumen to run the country like a profitable business. Putting aside for a moment that running a government is not in any way like running a business where profits, not people, are the primary driver, the lessons about business that Tagg Romney learned at his father’s knee should make anyone who buys this argument think twice.

[CC Image credit: Gage Skidmore | Flickr]