Mitt Romney pursued Jack Lyons with 'charm offensive', says disgraced tycoon's son "He was very low key, but very bright," Lyons's son Jonathon, who worked for his father, said of Mr Romney. Extremely switched on, and knew exactly what he was doing. The Daily Telegraph has disclosed that Lyons and his family invested $3 million in Bain Capital Fund I. His friend Robert Maxwell put in a further $2 million. Lyons was later convicted as one of the "Guinness Four," while Maxwell was found to have committed vast fraud. Private equity was a new industry, meaning profits were no sure thing. Yet they took the risk. "It was a matter of trust and confidence," said Jonathon Lyons. One had seen how they worked from the inside, seen how very bright and hardworking they were. "We all did very well," he said of the fund, which yielded annual returns of 173 per cent, according to a prospectus. It was substantially profitable. They were joined at Mark's by Bill Bain, the firm's founder and Mr Romney's mentor, as well as John Theroux, the firm's managing partner in London, according to Jonathon Lyons. Such was Jack Lyons's clout in the Establishment that he introduced Bain executives to Mrs Thatcher and Princess Margaret at receptions in his townhouse near Holland Park, another relative said. Yet the relationship soured after the Guinness scandal. Lyons and three others were in 1990 found guilty of theft and false accounting for helping to inflate the stout firm's share price to aid a takeover. Stripped of his knighthood and fined £4 million, "he was a scapegoat," said the relative. Romney, Bain - they cut him loose. It was a source of great sadness for him. He died in 2008 at 92. Mr Romney was called back to lead the consulting firm through the recession. One senior British colleague used an anecdote from a rare corporate gathering at his Massachusetts home at the end of the 1980s which he claims summed up Mr Romney's character and management style. "One of our wives was sick - she had been pregnant and the delivery had not gone well," said the executive. She had serious issues. Simultaneously, another wife of one of our colleagues had cancer. "As the wife of the first man was leaving the house, she was struggling," the former colleague recalled. Mitt turned to her and said: 'Buck up - you could be like her,' pointing to the second woman. Jonathon Lyons, 60, who deals in property and lives in Switzerland for financial reasons, defended Mr Romney against attacks from Barack Obama's re-election campaign over his holdings in offshore investments. "Why on earth would anyone pay more tax than they legally had to?" he asked. He said: "Romney would be a good president of the United States. They could do with him.