Apple's revenue: $400 Billion.
Meet Alex Roman. He is part of the 6 most powerful men running the Apple Corporate Empire.
Vice-President of Finance. One of the very few people with access to Tim Cook's personal office. Roman's job is squeezing App developers and ensuring iOS users can never escape the Apple store.
He testified in front of a California court to defend Apple fees.
The judge said he lied under oath. She says he is taking her for a fool.
From the Court decision:
In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option.*
To hide the truth, Apple's Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath.
Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise*
Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25924283/epic-v-apple-contempt-order.pdf
In principle, yes, but hiding wealth is also like Rich Bastard 101 stuff.
Wealth based fines would be extremely based. Most people would pay nothing and the wealthy would be paying a heck of a lot more. Which is why it will never happen its all about punishing the workers.
If we're doing percentage based fines, that would pay for forensic accounting.
True enough, but you’d still be playing legal whack-a-mole because by the letter of the law, you could still be legally relatively poor but have access to an insane amount of money in lots of ways.