A lawyer assigned to monitor Apple on its compliance with antitrust laws filed a complaint against the tech giant on Monday for obstructing his investigation.
According to the Associated Press, Attorney Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general for the Justice Department, complained about Apple’s top executives’ unwillingness to cooperate since he began the investigation in October. His team was supposed to have 13 hours of meeting with seven people involved in the e-book antitrust violation. However, he only met their lawyers.
The Cupertino, Calif.-based company failed to comply as well in submitting the requested documents to his team. They have received 303 pages only.
"In my 20 years of doing oversight work, I have never before had the entity over which I was exercising oversight unilaterally dictate who could be interviewed, even in those instances in which I have dealt with very sensitive matter, including highly classified matters of national security," Bromwich wrote in the report. Apple is not the first company that he had to monitor as had done it with hundreds of companies before.
Apple claimed that the presence of Bromwich’s team in their office is obstructing their business operations. Its lawyers responded to Bromwich’s report: “ He was conducting a roving investigation that is interfering with Apple's business operations, risking the public disclosure of privileged and confidential information, and imposing substantial and rapidly escalating costs on Apple that it will never be able to recover it if prevails on its pending appeal."
However, the Justice department defended that it was "remarkable, and wholly unbelievable" since the top execs were required to meet with the antitrust monitors for only an hour. The interviews being conducted by Bromwich’s team is part of the antitrust law process to know how Apple conducts its business and not a “roving investigation” as defined by the Apple execs.
