Apple Shareholder Lawsuit Dismissed 46
explosivejared wrote with a ZDNet article about Apple's win in the shareholder stock-options backdating lawsuit. This jives with Apple's own internal investigation of the matter. "The New York City Employees Retirement System had sued Apple claiming that the company's practice of backdating stock options diluted the value of the stock. Apple has admitted that it improperly backdated stock options on several occasions, including two awards to CEO Steve Jobs, and last December it took a $84 million charge to account for the options. But the suit had to show that Apple shareholders lost money in order to recover damages ..."
So basically... (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd think the shareholders would've figure out whether they actually lost money before bringing the suit. Or waited for the volatile market to drop some so they would be losing some money arguably due to the backdating, and then sued.
Re:So basically... (Score:5, Insightful)
What if Jobs were guilty (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So basically... (Score:5, Insightful)
What people are saying is that anyone who has held AAPL stock for any length of time over the last five years has made money--potentially lots of it--not lost it.
Was there a period of time where their apparent earnings were incorrectly valued at $84 million over what they should have been, and did that artificially inflate the stock value? Yes and probably. Was it wrong? Yes. Should people be able to sue for damages because they only made $10,000 off their investment instead of $15,000? I could probably argue both sides, but the story here is that the courts have said no.
For those people who are calling Jobs a crook and saying that he should be axed for this, I can probably see both sides of the equation. But I highly doubt that this was a planned attempt on his part to defraud anybody. Backdating options isn't illegal; reporting it incorrectly is, and that was the problem. It was fixed, and the hit to the stock value probably hit Jobs more than any other single shareholder. And gee, not that I want to see a criminal running a company I've invested in, but I think he's paid his dues, and if he were to leave, I think it's likely that AAPL would take a pretty significant dive, hurting shareholders more.
Just my $0.02