Charles Dharapak / AP

Casino owner Sheldon Adelson attends a Mitt Romney fundraising event at the Red Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas on Sept. 21.

Despite his vast wealth, Sheldon Adelson was not exactly a household name when the Republican presidential primary campaign got under way. But the casino magnate’s multimillion-dollar contributions to a pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC ended that.

Adelson’s support was linked to a shared stance with Gingrich as staunch supporters of Israel. Not quite so well publicized was Adelson’s financial stake in who wins the presidency.

A second Obama term, thanks to the incumbent’s proposed tax policies — could cost Adelson billions if he brought home profits earned at his overseas casinos, according to tax experts.

Since Gingrich flamed out in the primaries, Adelson and his wife Miriam have shifted their allegiance to GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, giving the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future $20 million.

With Romney as president, Adelson, the billionaire chairman and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., could bring his profits home tax-free.

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The Las Vegas Sands’ overseas operations account for 86 percent of its revenue from casinos, hotels and shopping, according to its 2011 annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Sands’ most lucrative holdings are in Macau, a special administrative region in China.

Super PACs like Restore Our Future can accept unlimited contributions from billionaires, corporations and unions and spend the money on ads helping their favorite candidates, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.

Adelson and family’s nearly $54 million in contributions through Oct. 17 to conservative super PACs  puts the gambling industry at second place among super PAC donors’ corporate interests, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the Federal Election Commission.

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In the final push in the 2012 presidential election, candidates Mitt Romney and Barack Obama make their last appeals to voters.

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With no limits on giving, economic analysis of donations to super PACs are more about a few wealthy individuals’ interests than fulfilling an industry’s legislative goals.

Adelson and family are responsible for more than 98 percent of all casino industry contributions to super PACs — or $53.7 million out of $54.6 million — but his legislative agenda does not necessarily reflect that of the American Gaming Association, which lists as major issues online gambling and visa reform to allow more high rollers to come to American casinos.

Finance industry tops list
The top industry-donor to super PACs in the 2012 election cycle by far has been securities and investments at roughly $94 million, according to records.

The list of donors is dominated by a relatively small number of extremely wealthy hedge fund and private equity millionaires and billionaires. The top 10 individual donors to this industry are responsible for almost half of its super PAC contributions. Twenty-one people and two corporations have given $1 million or more.

The average itemized individual contribution to all super PACs is a little more than $23,000, according to the Center’s analysis. The average contribution to a super PAC from the investment industry is more than $96,000.

The third-leading industry-donor, chemicals and related manufacturing, accounts for $31 million of all super PAC contributions, and almost $27 million comes from Harold Simmons, his wife Annette and his company. Contran Corp. controls several subsidiaries involved in chemical manufacturing, waste disposal and other businesses.

Topping Simmons’ agenda is minimizing the regulatory reach of government, according to an interview he gave to The Wall Street Journal in March. Many of Contran’s subsidiaries are subject to environmental regulations that cut into profits.

The fourth-leading donor by industry is real estate at about $23 million thanks to seven-figure donations from the National Association of Realtors and Harlan Crow and Crow Holdings. The NAR favors access to credit and tax breaks so more people can afford to buy homes.

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Fifth is the homebuilding industry with about $22 million, again a category dominated by a single wealthy individual — Texan Bob Perry. He has given $21.5 million to conservative super PACs to date.

Perry is perhaps best known for financing the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads during the 2004 election that helped sink John Kerry’s presidential campaign, but he has been a major donor to Texas political campaigns since the 1980s. He favors limiting damages a jury can award plaintiffs in civil suits.

Romney is ‘one of them’
The largest donors from the investment industry are not investment banks but an exclusive sub-group known as “alternative investing” — hedge funds and private equity firms.

Among the 26 donors to Restore Our Future who have given $1 million or more, 11 are in the hedge fund or private equity business.

Among the alternative investment industry’s top donors are Robert Mercer, a co-CEO of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, who gave $1 million to Restore Our Future and $600,000 to Club for Growth Action, which favors eliminating the capital gains tax.

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Other top donors include TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who now runs an investment firm, Paul Singer of Elliott Management, Wyoming investor Foster Friess and John Childs, chairman and CEO of a private equity firm.

Eighty percent of super PAC contributions from the investment community have gone to conservative super PACs, according to the Center's analysis.

James Simons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies, and George Soros*, the chairman of the hedge fund Soros Fund Management, have given a combined $10.1 million to pro-Obama and pro-Democratic super PACs.

Romney himself was a private equity man in his days at Bain Capital, which he co-founded.

“They view (Romney) as one of them,” said David Kautter, the director of the Kogod Tax Center at American University. “They tend to view him as someone who accumulated substantial wealth doing what they do, someone who understands what they do and someone who believes that what they do provides substantial value to the economy.”

Romney has said he would maintain, lower or eliminate the capital gains rate at various points during the race. Low rates benefit hedge fund and private equity managers, whose compensation comes primarily from investment returns.

Obama supports treating this type of compensation as regular income and subject to income tax rates up to 39.6 percent. In addition, Obama advocates raising the capital gains rate to 20 percent.

Adelson’s gamble on Romney
Romney was not Adelson’s top choice. Adelson invested $16.5 million in former House Speaker Gingrich via Winning Our Future, the primary pro-Gingrich super PAC, before the candidate dropped out May 2.

Now the top supporter of Restore Our Future, Adelson has said he is willing to spend $100 million electing Romney and a Republican Congress. The spending has made him newsworthy.

Adelson’s steadfast and occasionally controversial positions on Israel’s national security have also increased his profile in the national media and provided fodder for the opposition.

He opposes a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, once calling it a “stepping stone for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.”

He was also once one of the biggest backers of AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. But Adelson broke off relations with the group in 2007, when it supported increasing U.S. economic aid to Palestinians.

Adelson shifted his financial support to the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he sits on the board. The politically active nonprofit has reported spending $4.6 million on ads attacking Obama.

In an op-ed for the JNS News Service, Adelson wrote that American Jews should not trust Obama when it comes to Israel.

“For Obama, the issue is only political; for Israel, it’s existential — a matter of survival,” he wrote.

On paper, both Obama and Romney have similar positions on Israel — they both are committed to having a “special relationship” with the nation.

“Where they differ is in the way the current president perceives Israel,” said Aaron David Miller, an Israel expert at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “Israel is more of a matter of national security interest than it is a values argument.”

While Romney has a more “spontaneous, emotional instinct” to identify with Israel, Miller said, Obama seems less emotionally connected.

“In part it’s a generational thing,” Miller said — Obama came of age after the Israeli occupation. “And in part it’s a matter of temperament.”

Idealism or self-interest?
It is impossible to say for certain whether Adelson’s support of Romney is based on idealism or self-interest or both. Adelson’s spokesman refused to comment for this report.

Romney’s tax policies and Adelson’s financial interests are aligned, especially when it comes to tax treatment of overseas profits.

The Romney-backed “territorial tax system” would allow the Sands to bring its future foreign profits back to the U.S. free from U.S. income tax. Romney’s plan also calls for a “tax holiday” that would allow American companies with profits stashed abroad to repatriate them tax-free.

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A 2004 tax holiday resulted in the repatriation of one-third of all offshore earnings, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service.

Experts predict a territorial system would have a similar effect.

“I think it is very likely that more foreign earnings will end up back in the U.S. than we would have under the current worldwide system,” said Kautter.

Obama opposes the territorial tax system and has proposed a minimum tax for multinational corporations’ overseas earnings.

Under the current system, American companies that have operations abroad pay income tax to the country in which they earn the money then pay U.S. income tax when they bring profits home. Income taxes paid to the foreign government are deducted from the U.S. income tax when the money is repatriated; earnings left abroad are not subject to U.S. taxes.

Will McBride, the chief economist at the conservative Tax Foundation, calls the U.S. income tax on foreign profits a “repatriation tax.”

“Naturally that discourages business from bringing that money back home,” he said.

Obama and others argue that a territorial tax system would encourage American businesses to move overseas.

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The Sands holds $5.6 billion in in overseas profits, according to its 2011 annual report. Under Romney’s policy, Adelson and his company could repatriate it all for free.

The tax holiday combined with a switch to a territorial tax system would potentially provide a $1.8 billion tax break to the Sands the first year, according to a study from a liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress.

Adelson himself, as majority owner, stands to benefit.

“By a reasonable but conservative estimate, the tax cut he stands to get from Romney’s tax policies over a four-year term would be well over $2 billion,” said Seth Hanlon, the author of the study. “When you consider he’s going to spend $100 million on the presidential race, the return on investment is more than 2000 percent.”

*George Soros is the chairman of the Open Society Foundation, which provides funding for the Center for Public Integrity. For a list of Center donors, visit the website.

The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, independent investigative news outlet.  For more of its stories go to publicintegrity.org.

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Reuters / Brian Snyder

Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney listens to a question in New Hampshire on Dec. 11. He said in an interview about the missing public records that he had no obligation to help researchers for his opponents.

It appears it was legal for Mitt Romney's aides, on their way out of the governor's office in Massachusetts in 2006, to write personal checks for $65 each to buy the hard drives from their state office computers, taking with them government emails and other records of his administration, including information about the birth of the Romney health care insurance mandate.

It was legal for the Romney administration to spend $97,000 in public money to swap out computers and email servers, making sure that emails never got into the hands of the public, journalists, historians and, not incidentally as Romney himself points out, his opponents in the 2012 presidential campaign.

And the Romney administration got legal permission, Reuters reported Thursday evening, to destroy 150 boxes of government records.

But illegality is not the only test, say advocates of open government, who wonder when the public will insist that all candidates for high office do more than give lip service to transparency.

"Public officials need an attitude adjustment," said Ken Bunting, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition at the University of Missouri. "They need to recognize that the instruments of the government don't belong to them. They belong to the people. Self-government doesn't work without information. Government records, including emails, ought to be available without filing a lawsuit, without any more than a keystroke."

"Here's the irony," Bunting added. "In a roundabout way, Romney and his aides may have done a favor for open government. I would imagine that, for the citizens of Massachusetts, buying your hard drive so things disappear doesn't pass the smell test. Everybody's going to know it was done for the purpose of hiding information from the public. Even if that's perfectly legal, people would say, ‘How can they get away with that?’ Maybe there will be a move to change the law."

Is open government on the list of issues you consider when you choose a candidate? Post your comments below.

The facts so far
Here's what's known about the case of the purged emails and missing boxes:

On Nov. 17, The Boston Globe reported that 11 members of Romney's staff bought 17 computer hard drives five years earlier. Of course, the staff were buying more than a used hard drive — they were buying the government records on those hard drives. What about the backup copies on state servers? Other computers in the governor's office were replaced as part of "routine maintenance."

Reuters moved the story forward on Dec. 6, documenting that the Romney administration spent $97,000 to replace computers, causing other emails to be lost. On its way out the door, the Romney team spent $205,000 for a three-year lease on computers for the governor's office, replacing a lease that had provided the same number of computers for $108,000.

Aides to Romney's successor, Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, said they can't fulfill public records requests for the Romney administration's emails because the emails are gone. A spokesman for Romney's campaign blamed Patrick, a supporter of President Obama, for encouraging requests for public records, but didn't answer the question why the state computers were replaced, making the records unavailable to the public.

Then this Thursday, Reuters reported that the Romney administration got permission to destroy 150 boxes of paper records. A Romney spokeswoman wouldn't say whether the records were actually destroyed, but said the law was followed.

When the hard-drive story broke, Romney's staff emphasized that the purchases were legal. State law doesn't make it a crime to erase digital records, and state employees do have the option to buy the state computers they had used, though state officials said they can't recall anyone else buying just the hard drives.

Romney's reasons
The former governor has said the hard drives could have contained private information, such as "medical records, resumes from people who have applied for jobs, judicial appointments made, and people applying for those positions."

Keeping private information private wouldn't necessitate buying the hard drives, however. When government records are released to the public, it's common to redact, or withhold, information that is private, while disclosing the rest. If that weren't the law in every state, public officials could make every government record off limits to the public by merely writing their Social Security numbers or home telephone numbers at the bottom of the page. But state laws are an outdated patchwork when it comes to electronic information. Here's a guide to state laws on access to electronic information, from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Romney offered another rationale, in a subsequent interview with The Telegraph in Nashua, N.H., saying he had no obligation to help his political opponents. "Well, I think in government we should follow the law. And there has never been an administration" in Massachusetts, he said, "that has provided to the opposition research team, or to the public, electronic communications. So ours would have been the first administration to have done so."

Since then, he has dodged questions at campaign events about whether his computer was one of the ones that got a new memory, calling out to reporters "Thanks, guys," as he ducked into an SUV. If elected president, he said, he would follow a policy of transparency, doing "what is required by the law and then some."

On Dec. 7, The Boston Globe reported that previous Republican governors of Massachusetts had similarly wiped the slate clean, though the purchasing of home drives seems unprecedented. Tens of thousands of Cabinet secretary emails in the last three Republican gubernatorial administrations were automatically wiped off state computers after the officials left office, officials said.

A different set of records from the Romney administration will be made public. The Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth will make available more than 460 boxes of archived documents.  These will be made available five boxes at a time — no word yet on when that will begin or how long that will take.

Other Romney records are already public, but clearly that's mostly chaff. "An Associated Press examination of much of the available Romney archives holdings earlier this year suggested the material available then was far from comprehensive. More than 75 cartons reviewed by the AP included staff and legislative documents but no internal records written to or from Romney himself — except for ceremonial bill-signing and official letters."

An issue in many states
One element of this case is unique to Massachusetts. Though the state law calls for retention of emails as public records, a 1997 ruling by the state's Supreme Judicial Court made gubernatorial records exempt from that public records law. The secretary of the commonwealth, William Galvin, a Democrat, said Romney still had an obligation to turn all records over to the state archives, not to allow employees to take them, even if they wouldn't have been subject to disclosure.

"I'm not aware of any other state where the governor's office has such a broad exemption," said Bunting at the freedom of information clearinghouse. "In a lot of states, judicial emails are exempted. In about half the states, the legislature isn't covered."

Don't miss that part. Legislators tend to exempt themselves from state and federal records laws. That's why you're not reading emails from Barack Obama's term in the Illinois Senate, or Newt Gingrich's tenure as speaker of the House.

But other elements of this story are more common from state to state. Republican and Democratic governors have fought to keep public records out of the reach of the public. In Washington state, for example, Gov. Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, has exerted executive privilege to block access to records, in a case about to go to the state Supreme Court. And in Texas, presidential candidate  Gov. Rick Perry's staff has argued that it must keep emails for only seven days before purging them, because of a supposed lack of disk space for storage. Perry's office said the policy was the same one followed by his predecessor, George W. Bush.

The value of such records was demonstrated again this month in South Carolina, where Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican, sought the office on a platform of transparency in government. The State newspaper reported that her office had deleted most of its emails. Then emails did emerge showing that Haley tried to steer a state health care panel to a conclusion that she preordained.

Lessons from history
Romney's opponents haven't made much of the document purge. Newt Gingrich did make a comment, "in non-candidate mode," asking, "They did what?" And he added in another of his roles that it would make a good twist in a political thriller, "As a novelist, by the way, it's a lot of fun."

After Romney's non-explanatory explanations, the Erasergate story has dropped from Washington political media reports on the campaign.

"I'm not surprised that it hasn't had more legs, given what passes for journalism these days," said Mark Feldstein, a historian, former investigative correspondent for CNN and ABC and now a professor of broadcast journalism at the University of Maryland. "These records don't belong to Mitt Romney or his staff. Those computers are paid for by the taxpayers, and they were working on taxpayer time."

Feldstein, who wrote a history of Washington scandals called "Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture," said historians "are concerned, how are they going to write the history of these times if so much is on email and so few emails are preserved."

But politicians now, he said, are more savvy than in President Nixon's day.

"The great lesson learned from the Nixon administration wasn't to be more honest, but to not get caught, to make sure you don't leave a trail behind you," Feldstein said.

"Mitt Romney's father was a Cabinet secretary for Nixon, and no one in his administration would have been impervious to that lesson. George Romney was HUD secretary. The lesson was clear: Too much disclosure can torpedo an elected president, much less a presidential candidate."

We sent questions to the Romney campaign: Why did the staff purchase the hard drives? Was it to keep emails out of public hands? What is the campaign's position on open and transparent government? We heard no reply.

What do you think? Are you interested in holding public officials accountable for open government? Comment below.

"I think it matters more to the people like us," lamented Feldstein, the historian and former journalist, "than it does to the public."