Jobs to have pancreas removed? Shareholders not happy with Apple

Connie Guglielmo, Rochelle Garner and Jason Gale reported for Bloomberg this morning that Apple CEO Steve Job may need to have his pancreas removed, if Robert Thomas, head of surgery at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, is correct. Thomas was the first to perform the Whipple operation—which involves removing parts of the pancreas, bile duct and small intestine, and which sometimes results in having to remove the entire pancreas. Jobs underwent a procedure similar to the Whipple operation after he was diagnosed with a rare type of pancreatic cancer in 2004. It should be noted, though, that Thomas is not Jobs’ doctor, and doesn’t know the details of his condition.

If Jobs does have his pancreas removed, he will be “… at risk for severe diabetes,” stated Thomas.

The article goes on to discuss Apple’s plummeting stock shares, which fell $3.75, or 4.4 percent, to $81.58 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading at 9:34 a.m. New York time, after dropping as low as $80.05. Blooomberg is reporting that Apple isn’t handling the situation well at all, and haven’t been for quite some time.

“What they have done is the extraordinary accomplishment of coming out with a press release that is more opaque than the last one,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, associate dean of the Yale University School of Management. “They have now surrendered their credibility.”

The fact that Jobs hasn’t been seen in public since October is leading some to believe he or Apple has purposely misled investors about the severity of his condition. John Coffee, a securities law professor at Columbia Law School in New York, states that if share price drops dramatically, Apple shareholders may sue.

Still, there are some who believe that Apple and Jobs made last week’s disclosure in good faith:

“Mr. Jobs has an unusual and complicated medical condition,” Grundfest said. “When conditions are complicated, physicians have difficulty making clear decisions.”

Still, the pressure now is on Apple’s board to provide more information on the events leading up to Jobs’s decision to take leave, said James Post, a professor of management at Boston University.

“Has Steve Jobs and Apple’s board played fair with investors? There are a lot of unhappy and dissatisfied investors who are going to say the answer is no,” Post said. “The board members may not really answer the question of what did they know and when did they know it until there’s a discovery process in a lawsuit.”

Via [Bloomberg.com]