Samsung to Pay Apple $548 Million Settlement in Five-Year Old Patent Trial

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Apple wasn't sanctioned for back-dating options. Neither was any company in Silicon Valley. It isn't illegal to do so. What led to civil sanctions was failure to record the effects properly in the financial statements. That was a complex technical accounting issue. Back then there were easy ways to issue stock compensation without recording an expense. So much so that, yes, it's reasonable to me that a CEO wouldn't know which awards did or did not qualify for that special treatment.

Sure, nobody got sanctioned or convicted, as I pointed out earlier -- only hapless chaps like Rat without political connections go to jail. It isn't illegal to backdate options, but it is illegal to fabricate meeting minutes or doctor up your accounting to justify it. None of this can't happened without company executives and Anderson testified that Jobs fully understood the implication of such backdating -- Apple's own finding reveals that Jobs had been involved in other inappropriate options backdating. SOX did change a few things (eg, 2-day report requirement; expense accounting, even for at-the-money options). This is by no means astrophysics or no more complicated than South Korea's corporate accounting standard.