SEC Charges Former Apple General Counsel for Stock Option Backdating (2007) | Hacker News Reader

SEC Charges Former Apple General Counsel for Stock Option Backdating (2007)

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37 pointscorentin8810 comments

The description sounds too similar to be a coincident. Not saying it's the same person, but the same pattern that's described in the article (which was apparently repeated at a bunch of different companies as a standard practice).

Huh, interesting story. What gets me is:

> She also said that since it had been designed by the company’s outside legal counsel and approved by their auditors, it was fully compliant with the law.

Why would she serve jail time if legal counsel told her that it was legal?

Because what she did was still against the law. Having bad advice from a bad lawyer is not an excuse.

Otherwise anyone could ask their lawyer to write them a note and use it as an excuse / a defense against criminal charges.

But that would simply mean that the lawyer is culpable for the criminal charges since it's their responsibility to know the law and ensure that their recommendations comply with the law. I think it's odd that she's punished despite having sufficient basis to believe that what she was doing was legal. Especially in a system where the laws in some areas are so complex that there's no way to figure out what's legal or not without being an expert in the field/topic.

If you can't figure out if something is legal and if you go to an expert and they can't figure it out (or they're lying through their teeth), and you get punished for it, I feel like something is broken there.

That said, maybe she did know it wasn't legal, but we don't have enough information about the case to draw any conclusions from it.

When I used to work at a bulge bracket investment bank as a trader, if a sticky situation was on the horizon or we wanted to get aggressive structuring something, my bosses would call up some white shoe law firm/big4 accountant for a regulatory/tax opinion, if the opinion was negative it would get tossed and the next firm down the list would get a call until a favorable opinion was found. This was coordinated by internal counsel and standard practice. These opinions did occasionally get tested in litigation or asked for during audits by regulators, as far as I know they all stood up or were never queried further. This form of 'opinion arbitrage' is very common in high finance...

> But that would simply mean that the lawyer is culpable for the criminal charges since it's their responsibility to know the law and ensure that their recommendations comply with the law.

It would if giving inaccurate was a criminal offense, but it isn't.

And you don't consider this broken?

So you put this as a question but there is an implicit statement that "you consider this broken". That statement is from you though and not me. I don't seem to be a part of that conversation.

It's relevant because that's the whole point of my original comment. If you want to ignore that, fine, but it's sort of disgusting how people are so eager to defend the law because it's the law, not because of any inherent morality.

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