Apple Inc.'s former top accountant has agreed to pay more than $3.5 million to settle claims about his involvement in the manipulation of dates on stock options, a person familiar with the situation said.
Fred Anderson, who resigned as chief financial officer in October, will admit to no misconduct in the settlement, which will be filed in federal court this week, the person said.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is still pursuing a lawsuit against Nancy Heinen, Apple's general counsel until May 2006, regarding improperly dated options granted to Chief Executive Steve Jobs and his team, including Heinen herself, people familiar with that case said.
Heinen's lawyer, Cristina Arguedas, said her client had done nothing wrong.
"The timing of every grant she had anything to do with was authorized by the entire board," Arguedas said. "She is going to defend herself based on evidence and accounting principles at that time."
Federal regulators' pursuit of Anderson and Heinen might indicate that Jobs could be "off the hook," said Peter Henning, a professor of law at Wayne State University who blogs about white-collar crime.
"If you are going to bring a case against the chief executive, you do it together with the others," Henning said. "This is how high the case is going to reach and that's pretty high."
Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., acknowledged last year that it improperly dated stock options for six years beginning in 1997, saying there were 6,428 cases of backdating. The first incident occurred a few months after Jobs, who co-founded Apple, returned to the company as interim chief executive.
An internal investigation into the stock option debacle concluded in December that Jobs didn't receive or otherwise benefit from any of the options in question and wasn't aware of the accounting implications of the practice. Jobs at the time apologized for letting it happen "on my watch."
The company took $84 million in charges to correct its accounting.
Changing the dates on stock options is in itself not illegal and used to be widespread at Apple and elsewhere in Silicon Valley, where options are valuable recruitment and compensation tools. The trouble comes when companies don't properly financially account for or disclose what they have done.
More than 100 companies have been implicated in the backdating scandal.
