Should Steve Jobs Be Punished for His Backdating Practice?

Steve Jobs has been recognized as one of the most skilled CEO´s in the last decades, bringing benefits to almost all kind of people, but Apple competitors. To mention some people that have received any stimulation would be investors, shareholders, employees, related companies, users, etc. Therefore, Apple is a company that might be related somehow with thousands of stakeholders worldwide.

Options Backdating is a regular practice among large companies, mainly used to reward their employees. In the same way, backdating, is not completely illegal1 when is clearly communicated to the shareholders. Clearly, that´s the reason of the existing “ghost” meeting where supposedly the backdating was explained and approved by the board.

However, if there were some “victims” they could have been the shareholders, on the other hand at the end Jobs didn´t benefitted from the 7.5 million shares that were granted to him, since the stocks were reimbursed to Apple, so there was no great damage. Nevertheless, I think backdating its not a fair practice, when doing that they are getting rid of the risk implied in investing in stocks, assuring the buy of “in the money” options.

Finally, from my perception, regulators found out about Jobs backdating practice before he would have benefitted himself from it and letting him go, supposing that he wasn´t aware of this practices. In conclusion, punishing Steve Jobs directly, would have resulted in a tremendous damage to the industry, company and the shareholders would have been affected by a decrease in the stocks price.