That being said, South Korea prosecutors have relentlessly attacked Samsung and convicted the CEO on many accounts in the past. Now, let's look at how it's normally handled in the US -- remember Apple's option-backdating scandal? Steve Jobs walked away scott free, even when his own CFO testified against him. Anderson got all the blame and had to pay a huge lumpsum to settle. The gov't REFUSED to charge Jobs with any wrongdoing. Nobody in US goes to jail for any wrongdoing -- they just pay up settlement and everything is business as usual again. So, in that sense, the comparison is very flawed; certainly not the one presented by the VanityFair's article, written by Apple's own lawyers at MoFo
Tell that to Martha Stewart or Raj Rajaratnam. A mining CEO was convicted just yesterday of a cover-up over mine safety violations (albeit of misdemeanor charges).
I think the government didn't go after Steve Jobs because they knew they would lose in front of a jury. Steve Jobs micromanaged the tech side of the business, but didn't get into the nitty gritty of technical accounting and was open and upfront about the stock backdating. Remember, it wasn't the backdating itself that was illegal or against the rules. It was bad accounting that got companies in trouble (the backdating should have triggered a bigger expense recognition). Most of the backdating occurred pre-Sarbanes-Oxley before the CEO had to certify the financial statements, so ignorance of the accounting rules was a defense for Steve Jobs, but not Fred Anderson, who is a CPA and was in a "knew or should have known" situation. Apple did a thorough internal investigation, which the SEC acknowledged. Had they not done so, they might have sanctioned Jobs for some technical violation. In any case, the charges against Apple and Anderson were civil, not criminal. Samsung's CEO was actually convicted of criminal charges and had to get a pardon from the president to continue as CEO.