Apple won’t cooperate with antitrust case, Court-appointed lawyer charges

The court-appointed attorney on a legal antitrust case charged that responses to requested meetings with Apple personnel have been limited. Apple has proven itself a pain in the legal battle for a court-appointed lawyer, at least according to a legal document filed in the court.

In the document, the attorney charged 7 of the 11 people allowed to speak to the team were lawyers rather then business employees. The legal document filed also said that responses to requested meetings with Apple personnel have been limited. Since October, Bromwich said, his team has been given access to only one board member and one senior executive. Further,

Apple faces opposition from the U.S. in its bid to block a lawer as an antitrust monitor appointed in a electronic books price-fixing case from interviewing top executives and directors, including chief executive officer Tim Cook and board member Al Gore.

In October, a US judge asked former Assistant US Attorney and Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich to keep tabs on Apple following a ruling that charged the company with conspiring with other publishers to set e-book prices.

Just one month after the investigation started, Apple and Bromwich were already at odds with each other. Apple cited the attorney’s fees as excessive, while Bromwich complained that his requests to meet with key Apple people were largely being ignored.

Now Bromwich has laid out his full list of grievances against Apple in a court filing dubbed the “Bromwich Declaration.”

Kyle Andeer, Apple’s director of competition law, may have provided some reasoning behind Apple’s apparent reticence to fully cooperate, according to Bromwich’s filing. Andeer told Bromwich that Apple was very concerned about the requests to speak with board members and senior executives as they were very busy, according to Bromwich. But he also said that “we would see a lot of anger about the case that still existed within the company,” according to Bromwich.

The interviews themselves have not taken place at Apple’s corporate HQ in Cupertino, Calif., but instead in a “remote location several miles away in Sunnyvale, Calif.,” Bromwich added.