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- Merc News: Former Apple Lawyer has SEC Troubles
The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that former Apple General Counsel Nancy Heinen will be the first target of an SEC probe into Apple backdating scandal. The news comes just a day after reports from the same paper claiming...
The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that former Apple General Counsel Nancy Heinen will be the first target of an SEC probe into Apple backdating scandal. The news comes just a day after reports from the same paper claiming CEO Steve Jobs will not be charged.
The gist of the charges? Heinen played a key role in two backdating episodes that shifted options to Jobs:
Heinen's main problems stem from her involvement in a December 2001 grant of 7.5 million stock options to Jobs that were backdated to October through falsified minutes of a board meeting that did not occur.
Lawyers familiar with the grant say the board believed it could use the October date because the stock price was higher than when it first approved the grant to Jobs in August, although lower than in December, when it was finalized after months of negotiations. Heinen advised the board on Jobs' grant, and believed rules governing stock options - which have since changed - allowed the October date.
A securities fraud charge from the SEC would depend on proving Heinen's actions deceived investors because the true cost of the options was hidden by shifting the grant date from Dec. 18, when the stock was $21.01 a share, to Oct. 19, when it stood at $18.30.
Heinen also faces SEC action because of allegations she approved the falsification of documents to backdate Jobs' grant. When the board finalized the Jobs grant shortly before Christmas 2001, board member Arthur Levinson, Genentech's CEO, sent an e-mail saying the deal with Jobs was done and instructed Heinen to document the Oct. 19 date, according to three people familiar with the grant.
Heinen, these sources say, then e-mailed Wendy Howell, an in-house Apple lawyer who ordinarily documented stock options, instructing her to handle the Jobs documents. From there, the accounts of Heinen and Howell differ, according to sources familiar with their versions.
What is not disputed is that Howell wrote phony meeting minutes to show the board approved the Jobs grant on Oct. 19, 2001. Howell maintains she was instructed by her superiors to create the meeting minutes, but Heinen denies knowledge of the false minutes, although she signed them in her role as the board's corporate secretary, according to sources familiar with both accounts. Two people familiar with Heinen's account say she regularly had stacks of minutes to sign, and didn't scrutinize the Howell minutes.
Heinen is an O.G. Jobs crony: prior to serving as Apple's General Counsel, she was General Counsel of NeXT. Heinen resigned from Apple last May, but her fingerprints are still so fresh at Apple that she remains listed on some of the company's corporate bios pages (though her actual bio appears to have been taken down).
The company's woes may not end with Heinen. The Merc also reports that the SEC is considering a case against former Apple CFO Fred Anderson.
Mat Honan
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