Ultimately Apple dug themselves into this hole:
you don't say on Day 1: "minor issue, nothing to see here"
and then say on Day 10: "umm oops, sorry, need 6 months medical leave".
and then say after 6 months: "hey surprise, i got a new liver"
There is probably a non-legal "good manners/protocol" debate that can be had about that sequence (or not releasing info during the medical leave specifically).
The legal issue the SEC is after is if whether or not on Day 1 Jobs ( and perhaps other members of board) knew (been told by doctors ) that he had liver failure/cancer/whatever and that the root cause was not nutritional problem. That saying it was a "nutritional problem" was just a cover so that folks would go away and could later 'disappear' to have a transplanet on the "down low".
That is making a false material statement. Doesn't really have to do with health, HIPAA or any of the other diversionary stuff that people keep throwing up. Health is just the domain of the false material statement, but no different in principle than
Day One: we expect to make $2B profit this quarter.
Day 10: oops not going to make $2B profit this quarter
6 months later : had huge accounting glitch and made no money two quarters ago.
Again it is case of when you knew it was true at the time of each statement. If on Day one the company officier knew that there was no way was going to make $2B in profit that quarter, it is a false material statement. If the accountants came to the CEO and told him that only had $100K in profits so far in quarter and projections had it coming up to only $900K by quarter end. It would be false to go out and state that expected to hit some $2B mark when there was nothing to support that.
Same SEC investigation either way.
Now if the doctors told Jobs they were confident that if he just ate different food he would be OK. Then deeper tests put a liver tumor on the table after the first statement. Told the truth as far as knew it. SEC will verify the sequence and investigation over.
Similar, the finance example. If was bringing in money hand over first and then somehow the market collapsed, earthquake blew up factory , or something completely unexpected happened to throw off expectation. Then find out somebody at lower level was cooking the books several months later... then not in trouble for the misleading statements. [ might be in trouble because financial controls were loose enough some low level person could cook the books for their division. ]
The better course, if Jobs really wanted to keep it out of the press, would have been to just take the long extended sick leave as soon as decided it was his #1 problem to work on before even found out what root cause was (assume the worst and come back earlier if isn't). So back in December just issue note "going on sick leave till July, hopefully see y'all after the 4th of July. Going to devote 100% of my time to getting better. ".
What is ironic is that if external folks weren't hounding him over his health would he have taken time out to get get the treatment to save his life? If his doctors were clueless he had a major liver problem and he kept putting off getting more precise help, there was a significant probability would have let this drag on till it really was fatal and there weren't any options.
That's one reason why folks have a problem with this. Billionaire, cancer survivor with much higher than average risk for liver cancer and can afford any doctor/test he wants, and somehow he is wandering around Apple getting sicker every day and ignorant of what is the root cause. It could have happened that way. Many people with the resources and the risk would have been a bit more proactive and known sooner.
However, in this case ignorance was bliss. Jobs will have ducked both problems if he was ignorant of his health. Lucky dude.