Britannia Radio

China Confidential

Thursday, January 15, 2009

 

Is Apple Violating SEC Disclosure Rules?

Dateline USA....

Public companies continue to spit in the faces of shareholders.

Take Apple, for example. It is clearing operating unethically. It may also be breaking the law.

The media-darling company could be in violation of its legal obligation to disclose information of material importance in order to create a level playing field. 

The U.S. securities system is based on full disclosure, not merit. Absent full disclosure, investors are plunged back to the days of rampant insider trading and stock manipulation.

Bloomberg reports on Apple's controversial non-disclosure of its CEO's illness--a public relations disaster that is hurting shareholders during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a global meltdown partly caused by corporate arrogance, secrecy and greed.

Apple’s unwillingness to provide details on Jobs’s health has frustrated investors, who have watched the stock plummet with each new rumor about his condition. Apple didn’t give any details about Jobs’s health even as he appeared increasingly thin in 2008, saying only it was a private matter. Jobs said last week he suffers from a “hormone imbalance” that caused weight loss.

Shares Plunge

Apple, based in Cupertino, California, fell $3.75, or 4.4 percent, to $81.58 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading at 9:34 a.m. New York time, after dropping as low as $80.05.

Jobs, 53, said he would remain CEO while taking a medical leave of absence until the end of June. Just last week, Jobs said his treatment should be “simple and straightforward.”

“There’s been too little information, and the information that’s come out has been vague -- creating more concern rather than conveying a sense of certainty,” said Nell Minow, founder of the Corporate Library, a research firm specializing in corporate governance based in Portland, Maine. “They have achieved confusion, and a sense of being unsettled.”

Apple is not providing information beyond the statement, said spokesman Steve Dowling. The company’s directors, including former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt, either couldn’t be reached or declined to comment.

‘More Opaque’

“What they have done is the extraordinary accomplishment of coming out with a press release that is more opaque than the last one,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, associate dean of the Yale University School of Management. “They have now surrendered their credibility.”

Jobs, who co-founded Apple in 1976, returned as CEO in 1997 and has revived the Macintosh computer brand while pushing the company into new markets with the iPod media player and iPhone. He rarely gives interviews and once had a biography of him pulled from Apple’s corporate store. Andy Hertzfeld, one of the main architects of the Mac operating software, wrote in his book that those who worked with Jobs said he was surrounded by a “reality distortion field.”

Jobs hasn’t been seen in public since October.

Click here to read the whole story.

The public has a right to know what's going on. The right to privacy is a red herring. 

Apple directors, including the global warming zealot and charlatan Al Gore, are acting as company shills and stooges.