Apple joins the stock option grants investigation party

Recently we have seen quite a number of companies announcing that they have found so called irregularities involving stock option grants. Apple today announced that it also "has discovered irregularities related to the issuance of certain stock option grants made between 1997 and 2001" during an "internal investigation".

The apparently ongoing investigation has been initiated by Apple’s outside directors, who hired "independent counsel to perform an investigation." Apple said that the SEC has been informed bout the investigation.

According to a statement released by the company today, "one of the grants in question was to CEO Steve Jobs" but "it was subsequently cancelled and resulted in no financial gain to the CEO."

Among the companies that recently announced issues, investigations or SEC notifications relating to stock option grants in the past weeks are Cnet, Rambus, Foundry Networks, Applied Micro, Verisign, Cyberonics and Progress Software.