Mitt Romney's campaign hit by questions on his business past

Mitt Romney's presidential campaign was under siege last night (Friday) as he faced further questions about when he quit as the boss of the private equity firm Bain Capital.

The Republican candidate has long maintained that he left the company in 1999 to run the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, remaining only the nominal head of the business until 2002 - a position supported by a statement from the company.

However, yesterday it emerged that Mr Romney had admitted continuing to attend board meetings in sworn testimony he gave to prove his residential status when running for governor of Massachussetts in 2002, raising new questions over the extent to which he was involved in the company. "There were a number of social trips and business trips that brought me back to Massachusetts, board meetings, Thanksgiving and so forth," he said in testimony that was uncovered by the Huffington Post website.

The Bain row, which has dogged several of Mr Romney's previous political campaigns, has threatened to crowd out his message about the stalling recovery and Barack Obama's poor record in creating jobs. The President's re-election campaign has called on Mr Romney to release his tax returns and argued that he can be held politically responsible for the outsourcing and bankruptcies at companies in which Bain invested until 2002.

The Romney campaign in turn accused Mr Obama of being a liar and called on him to ask "out of control staff" to apologise, but the President has refused, saying it was right to question whether Mr Romney was the "Mr Fix-it" candidate he claimed to be. "If you're a head of a large private equity firm or hedge fund, your job is to make money. It's not to create jobs. It's not even to create a successful business. It's to make sure that you're maximising returns for your investor," said Mr Obama.

"That's part of the system. But that doesn't necessarily make you qualified to think about the economy as a whole, because as president, my job is to think about the workers. My job is to think about communities, where jobs have been outsourced."

Bill Clinton also kept the focus on Mr Romney's personal wealth and use of tax havens, telling a television breakfast news yesterday that it "struck me as a little odd" that Mr Romney had only issued one year of tax returns. "This is the first time in, I don't know, more than 30 years that anybody running for president has only done that," he said.

Two Republican congressman urged Mr Romney to clear the air, as strategists warned that his campaign was in danger of being blown off course over Bain and taxes.

"His personal finances, the way he does things, his record, are fair game," said Pete Sessions, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

In another apparent attempt to shift focus, the Drudge Report website published a story that Condoleezza Rice might stand as Mr Romney's vice-president. The former secretary of state was key speaker at a fundraising event last month but has said there is "no way" she would stand, leading commentators to dismiss the report as "distra