Apple’s famous reality distortion field and obsessive demands for secrecy have suddenly hit the reality of US law courts.
The judge overseeing the mysterious bankruptcy of an Apple sapphire supplier dared to actually question why it should be demanding secrecy in the case.
Jobs’ Mob has managed to keep the entire case locked up with its NDAs and hardly any information has emerged since GT Advanced Technologies filed for bankruptcy.
Key court filings reveal that GT Advanced is terrified of the confidentiality requirements in its Apple contracts which carry fines of $50 million.
However at a hearing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Springfield, Massachusetts, Judge Henry Boroff told a lawyer for Apple that the documents do not seem to contain much proprietary information. Boroff instructed Apple to provide him a list by Monday of exactly which elements of the filings are sensitive.
He said that he had a foot high stack of documents, and it could not be all kept secret. This of course runs counter to the Apple view that everything should be very secret and might be a move by the company to prevent information getting out which might make it look bad.
Apple and GT Advanced appeared to have made a complex series of agreements. The two made a deal in November for GT to set up a factory in Mesa, Arizona, to make scratch-resistant sapphire glass exclusively for Apple.
Boroff said that what he was looking at appeared like a construction suit, where a homeowner says to the contractor, ‘It didn’t come out the way I wanted to,’ and the contractor says: ‘Well, it would have come out that way if you didn’t continue to change the specifications.'”
Boroff’s comments came during a hearing that was meant to consider a motion by GT Advanced to keep certain documents sealed and begin the process of winding down its operations. But those issues were postponed until next Tuesday, in light of the recent appointment of GT Advanced’s official creditors’ committee.
However, other than Apple the other creditors involved in the case want to know what happened. The US Department of Justice’s bankruptcy watchdog in court papers said sealing information about GT Advanced’s downfall would “thwart” the objectives of bankruptcy laws and “unjustifiably undermine” the system’s fairness.
The company which designer Jonathan Ive described a week or two back as built on integrity has finally agreed to cough up $450 million after it conspired with five publishers to hike the prices of e-books.
