Romney tax plans ‘good for China but not US’

Mr Obama has campaigned repeatedly in Ohio, a critical industrial state in the Midwest and one that does not reliably vote Republican or Democratic. The few so-called swing states like Ohio are expected to decide the presidential contest in November’s vote.

There has seldom been a US presidential election that looked to be as close. Mr Romney and Mr Obama are battling for the White House against a backdrop of economic uncertainty and 8.2 per cent unemployment nearly four years after the near collapse of the financial system.

Mr Romney, whose Republican party is typically more trusted by voters to handle the economy, has been under nearly constant attack from the Obama camp, particularly on tax policy and the former Massachusetts governor’s history as a businessman.

Mr Romney built a fortune estimated at a quarter of a billion dollars from Bain Capital, the private equity firm he co-founded in the 1980s. Over the past week, a row has blown up over when exactly Mr Romney left the firm. He says it was 1999, when he took over management of the 2000 Olympic Games. But recently uncovered filings by Bain with the US Securities and Exchange Commission list him as holding all the top positions in the company as late as 2002.

That becomes important because it shores up Mr Obama’s claims that Mr Romney ran a firm that increasingly in that period began closing down some businesses it owned and sent the jobs overseas.

On at least three filings with the SEC since 1999, Bain listed Mr Romney as the company’s “controlling person”, as well as its “sole shareholder, sole director, chief executive officer and president”. One of those documents – as late as February 2001 – lists his “principal occupation” as Bain’s managing director.

Mr Romney told Fox News that Mr Obama’s attacks were “misdirected” and “dishonest”.