Filed under: Management, Insiders, Apple Inc (AAPL)
Fortune (which shares parent Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) with BloggingStocks) provides at least two examples which raise questions about whether Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs pushed the Apple board into violating the law.
Two revelations in the article — that Apple’s board decided not to disclose Jobs’s pancreatic cancer, for which he delayed surgery because he wanted to try a diet cure, and that Jobs set a backdated options date of January 16, 2001 which the board rubber-stamped, giving recipients a profit of either $1.6 million or $3.9 million — make me wonder whether Jobs convinced Apple’s board to break the law.
As I posted in 2006, Lazard, Ltd.’s (NYSE: LAZ) board may have failed to disclose the illness of its CEO, Bruce Wasserstein, when reports surfaced that he was out of the office with a heart ailment. A lawyer I spoke with said that if a CEO is unable to do his or her job due to illness, the board must disclose it. If Jobs’s pancreatic cancer surgery kept him away from doing the CEO’s job, how did Apple’s lawyers defend the failure to disclose? It surely couldn’t have been the lack of materiality — some estimated that if his illness had been disclosed, Apple stock would have lost 20% of its value.
Continue reading Did Steve Jobs push the Apple board to break the law?
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