Steve jobs claimed he never really understood the implications of the options backdating because “he is not a financial guy”
Yeah right. The biggest control freak on the planet, loves money more than anyone I know, and he is not aware of implications of the stock option backdating in his own company?
If you believe that, I got an ice skiing slope in Florida to see ya.
Steve Jobs is not guilty like OJ Simpson is not guilty. He got away with it too.
Even Fortune magazine (as pro Apple as they come)was not buying it:
“The Apple iWash: Steve Jobs’s premature exoneration”
The second argument is: We don’t have to worry about whether Jobs was trying to backdate or springload options because “he did not . . . financially benefit from these grants.” Again, this is no defense. If a hypothetical CEO gave himself backdated options in a effort fraudulently to deceive shareholders and enrich himself, that attempt would be a completed crime regardless of whether the dot-com bubble subsequently burst before he could capitalize on the attempted fraud. (The bursting of the bubble did, in fact, wipe out the value of all Jobs’s options. Apple replaced them with 5 million shares of restricted stock, worth almost $75 million, in 2003.) And if a hypothetical CEO gave someone else backdated options, then it’s hard to believe that he really wasn’t benefiting financially–albeit indirectly. His company would have been benefiting–it was able to offer higher compensation to employees than its law-abiding competitors could–and anything that benefited the company would have indirectly enhanced the CEO’s compensation and the value of his stock.
The third claim is that we don’t have to worry about whether Jobs was trying to backdate or springload options because he didn’t “appreciate the accounting implications.” Well, that’s getting closer to a defense, but I still don’t think he’s there yet. None of us fully appreciated the accounting implications of awarding in-the-money options at that time; the rules were excruciatingly complex and everyone twisted themselves into pretzels to avoid ever having to grapple with them. The relevant question is whether Jobs understood that backdating was morally or legally wrong–and the filing doesn’t tell us the answer to that one.
Furthermore, even if Jobs says he didn’t understand that backdating was illegal or wrong, and even if we believe him, I’m still not sure that gets him out of the woods. Yes, ignorance of the law is a defense to some white-collar crimes (mainly tax offenses), but it’s not a defense to most others. (Look at Pattie Dunn, the former chairman of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), now facing four state-law felonies for having conducted an investigation that two top in-house attorneys repeatedly kept assuring her was A-okay.)
To me, Friday’s filing does not look like the curtain closing on this particular play, but more like the curtain closing on Act I, Scene I.”
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2007/01/02/the-apple-iwash-steve-jobss-premature-exoneration/
Marketwatch:
“In October 2006, Apple issued an unusual statement in which the company admitted that, while Jobs was aware of the backdating, he was unaware of the accounting implications.
.....
That position was undercut six months later when former Apple finance chief Anderson — who settled with the SEC — issued his own statement, in which he said he had warned Jobs specifically of the implications of backdating. See full story”
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/steve-jobs-haunted-by-backdating-scandal-again
loves money more than anyone I know
Yep, he's really greedy for taking that $1 a year salary from Apple.
His compensation is almost completely tied up in the value of his companies. Stock options and grants are how he gets paid. He's so rich because he increased the value of his companies so much, not because he drew big salaries like most CEOs.