“Kevin Ryan stepped down today as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California. That could potentially be relevant to Apple, because Ryan has led the government’s effort to prosecute Silicon Valley companies on options-related transgressions, such as backdating. Last July, Ryan brought the first backdating indictment, against two former Brocade Communications executives. Just around that time, he also created a backdating atask force . And sources say it is his office that is scrutinizing Apple’s books, as well,” Peter Burrows reports for BusinessWeek.
Burrows reports, “So what does Ryan’s departure mean for Apple? That depends on whether his replacement pursues backdating cases as aggressively as he has. As it is, Macauley points out that Ryan has publicly said it is unlikely his office would indict more than five companies (the math is complicated: Ryan has said his office is most intently examining red flags at ten to twenty percent of twenty five of the companies now being investigated. That’s 2.5 to 5, to be exact).”
“That’s not a gigantic caseload, but some former government prosecutors and defense attorneys I’ve spoken with wouldn’t be surprised if it fell even more…,” Burrows writes. “That’s not to say the folks at Apple should be sleeping any easier. No doubt, a decision to charge Apple would create a steam whistle heard round the world, in no time flat. Still, my guess is that Ryan’s departure means the odds of criminal charges against Apple or Steve Jobs got a bit longer today.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “SKY LARK” for the heads up.]
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try doing your homework before posting u douche bag
Good to see some other peeps are on the ball
hint: http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002367.php
How does one induce an honest attorney to resign simply by requesting that they do so?
Ah, such a naïve question!
“We’re going to fire you because we don’t like what you did on case XYZ, plus you were 4 minutes late filing the ABC Brief in December of 1998. But we’ll give you the option of resigning and you can keep your severance package/paid vacation hours/reputation/pension/children/etc….”
no wrongdoing means no wrongdoing
“This is a tempest in a teapot. If you search MDN for related articles, you’ll see some excellent rebuttals to “backdating is a crime”.”
Unfortunately like most of the stuff posted on MDN, none of them are correct. The way Apple did it’s backdating is a crime.
“ow me one legitimate shareholder who feels they have been robbed since Jobs came back.”
You’re confusing having Apple make a lot of money for you being the inverse of Apple robbing you.
Apple did rob it’s shareholders. Simultaneously it made a lot of money for them.
That’s probably hard for a lot of MDN readers to grasp, since financial literacy on this forum is pretty low. It is possible for a company to be doing wrong while still putting money in shareholder’s pockets for a while (Enron anyone).
Why that’s a problem is because you have dishonest executives, who in tough times will be prepared to bend accounting rules and make up false information to meet street expectations. That doesn’t give investors a true view of how the company is really performing. Or they will bend the rules to hide the true amount of their own compensation from investors.