Yikes
Holiday’s over. Here’s your rude awakening.
Apple reportedly falsified options documents.
Original Law.com piece by Justin Scheck with the allegations here.
It looks like the meat of the information relates to possible wrongdoing by former execs Nancy Heinen and Fred Anderson. While there are number of “if the SEC is going to go after Steve Jobs” type statements, there’s absolutely no information that implicates Jobs in the falsification of these documents.
While it will likely take some time — perhaps a matter of months — for the government to decide whether to file criminal charges against Jobs, the 10(k) filing on Friday should provide plaintiffs lawyers with some ammunition for their suits against the company.
Hey, if he’s done nothing wrong, it could take them years to decide as they would have to wait for him to do something wrong.
That is a rather irresponsible paragraph, unless Scheck knows something more that implicates Jobs. The only evidence provided is that he has retained his own legal counsel, which raises a few of the hairs on the Macalope’s velvety flanks, but is hardly damning given the fact that Jobs is personally named in the class action suit against the company.
We’ll know more on Friday.
UPDATE: Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray sez there’s less than a five percent chance Steve Jobs is at risk.
The Macalope likes those odds but how do you calculate that?
The Macalope holds an inconsequential number of Apple shares.
Dude, I’m celibate. PLEASE no more talk about your velvety flanks…
Munster basically said he would have been shocked if Jobs had NOT retained his own council- sounds like common sense to me.
It’s simple really:
N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L
Where R* is the rate of star formation in our galaxy, fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets, ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planet, fl is the fraction that actually go on to develop life, fi is the fraction that go on to develop intelligent life, fc is the fraction that develop a system like the SEC, and L is the chance that Jobs was stupid enough to falsify documents when he’s already got more money than can be spent in a lifetime.
If you plug in the numbers using reasonable assumptions you’ll find that Jobs has less than a 5% chance of indictment (of course the proof also shows that there is a 12% chance we’ll be invaded by aliens after our supply of 2nd gen iPod shuffles so I wouldn’t get too bullish).
I also have a truly remarkable proof of the existance of a third generation of the iPhone which this comment box is too small to contain.
Grrr … dang you WordPress, the commenting system stripped my carefully placed subscripts and superscripts!!!
Hmm. The Macalope hopes that’s your last theorem.