Apple Disclosures About Jobs To Face SEC Review

suraj.sun writes "US regulators are examining Apple Inc.'s disclosures about Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs's health problems to ensure investors weren't misled, a person familiar with the matter said. The Securities and Exchange Commission's review doesn't mean investigators have seen evidence of wrongdoing, the person said, declining to be identified because the inquiry isn't public. Bloomberg News reported last week that Jobs is considering a liver transplant as a result of complications after treatment for cancer, according to people who are monitoring his illness."

Comments

fixed link

[TheGratefulNet]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aDL78iMCdOzk

(its a question mark, not a quote mark...)

copy the url, look at it, does it look 'right' to you? ;) usually its a question mark as the first delim char before the parms.

Re:fixed link (text inline)

[TheGratefulNet]

Apple Disclosures About Jobs Said to Face SEC Review (Update2)

By David Scheer and Connie Guglielmo

Jan. 21 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. regulators are examining Apple Inc.'s disclosures about Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs's health problems to ensure investors weren't misled, a person familiar with the matter said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's review doesn't mean investigators have seen evidence of wrongdoing, the person said, declining to be identified because the inquiry isn't public. Bloomberg News reported last week that Jobs is considering a liver transplant as a result of complications after treatment for cancer, according to people who are monitoring his illness.

Investors have been pressing for information on Jobs's health since June, when he appeared noticeably thinner at an Apple event. The company's stock whipsawed this month after Jobs, who battled pancreatic cancer in 2004, said he would remain CEO while seeking a "relatively simple" treatment for a nutritional ailment. Nine days later, Jobs said he would take a five-month medical leave after learning his health issues were "more complex."

"The good news flipped by the bad news makes one wonder what Apple knew," said James Cox, a law professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. "It's not surprising for the SEC to come in and look afterward, given the pressure and publicity regarding their handling of a lot of cases," such as criticism of the SEC's response to Bernard Madoff's alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

SEC spokesman John Nester declined to comment on the Apple inquiry. Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Cupertino, California- based Apple, declined to comment.

Apple will report first-quarter earnings after the market close today, followed by a conference call at 5 p.m. New York time.

Shares Rose

Apple's shares rose 4.2 percent on Jan. 5 after Jobs said he had been diagnosed with a hormone imbalance that caused him to lose weight throughout 2008 and "that has been robbing me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy." It was the first public disclosure of Jobs's health since August 2004, when he revealed he had undergone successful surgery to remove a neuroendocrine islet cell tumor, a rare, slow-growing type of cancer that affects as many as 3,000 people in the U.S. annually.

Before today, Apple stock had dropped 8.4 percent since the company disclosed Jan. 14 that Jobs, 53, would be on medical leave through June. The shares added $1.58, or 2 percent, to $79.78 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading at 9:31 a.m. New York time.

Apple has declined to provide specifics of the illness and Jobs said he won't comment further about his health. "Why don't you guys leave me alone -- why is this important?" he said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg News on Jan. 16.

Definitive Answers'

To bring any case, the SEC would probably have to show the company tried to benefit by withholding information about an unambiguous diagnosis, said Peter Henning, a former federal prosecutor and SEC lawyer who now teaches at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit.

"It would be difficult, and certainly a new area of the law," Henning said. "You would have to pin down exactly what they knew, and with a health issue -- unlike a merger or a decline in revenue -- it's not subject to definitive answers."

Corporate governance experts say shareholder interest in Jobs is unusually high because he is considered synonymous with Apple. He returned as CEO in 1997, turning the once-unprofitable maker of Macintosh computers into a successful consumer- electronics company with the iPod media player and iPhone. Jobs established himself as the face of Apple, serving as the main pitchman at every major product announcement over the past decade while yielding little time to other top executives.

"Steve Jobs himself thinks the Steve Jobs mystique is of value -- otherwise, why not have other people introduce those products over the past 10 years?" said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, associate dea

Re:Apple isn't Apple without Steve.

[afidel]

Looking at the 3 month chart they are moving almost exactly with the market and are down about 2% less then the NASDAQ composite over that time period. Over the 1 year period they are down about 12% more than the NASDAQ composite but the movements are mostly market tracking.

Re:leave steve alone!

[DanTheStone]

If Apple's disclosures were an attempt to influence stock prices, then it would matter. The SEC just seems to be watching for fraud like stock manipulation. That is their job, after all.

Re:leave steve alone!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that they are interesting in the possibility that apple lied about jobs' health, not in his health per se. As TFA notes, apple is not obliged to disclose anything about jobs' health; but they decided to do so anyway. If they were lying about it, that would be an issue.

Re:Ethical Question: SHOULD HE EVEN GET A LIVER?

[dogmatixpsych]

As someone who has recently been involved in transplant cases (doing psych evals of the potential recipients) here's a bit of what I learned (this might just be true at my particular hospital).

1. Preference is given to people who demonstrate that they will be able to maintain the new organ after transplant. People with good social networks (or a lot of money to hire full time nursing care) are far less likely to be rejected.
2. Age generally is not factored in (a lot of transplants fail within 10 years anyway) unless the patient is very young or very old. The thing about a transplant is that it generally won't let someone live a normal life, just a better and longer one.
3. The parent is correct about the "usefulness" of the organ. If the team of doctors don't think it will significantly improve quality of life, they won't do it.
4. Money is a factor. If someone like Steve Jobs can pay for a transplant out of pocket without dealing with insurance, he could move up the list just because there is no need to wait for insurance bureaucracy.
5. Most of the waiting comes from waiting for a good "match." If someone has a family member or friend who wants to donate, then they go ahead with the donation process (after extensive medical and psychological testing, at least that's the way it's done at major hospitals). With livers, people can donate a piece of their liver although it's much more common to have a standard transplant from a deceased donor.

Basically, much of what the parent said was correct. However, money can influence the process (I'm not talking about bribing, which is both unethical and illegal). Other than some serious psychological issues and/or a history of non-compliance with medical care, there is very little that disqualifies people from transplantation. A lot of it comes down to the "lottery" of finding an organ match. Steve probably would get some preferential treatment though.

Re:MPEG-4 - invented by Apple?

[sribe]

I hope you did more research for the rest of the 'facts' in your post.

He was correct. MPEG-4 did adopt the QuickTime storage format. It was huge news at the time, because Microsoft had been pushing hard to have the committee adopt their proposal, and was quite upset that they lost out to Apple. I think the quote you referenced was simply referring to Apple adding support for the complete standard, codecs and all that.