Fortune (which shares parent Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) with BloggingStocks) provides at least two examples which raise questions about whether Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs pushed the Apple board into violating the law.

Two revelations in the article -- that Apple's board decided not to disclose Jobs's pancreatic cancer, for which he delayed surgery because he wanted to try a diet cure, and that Jobs set a backdated options date of January 16, 2001 which the board rubber-stamped, giving recipients a profit of either $1.6 million or $3.9 million -- make me wonder whether Jobs convinced Apple's board to break the law.

As I posted in 2006, Lazard, Ltd.'s (NYSE: LAZ) board may have failed to disclose the illness of its CEO, Bruce Wasserstein, when reports surfaced that he was out of the office with a heart ailment. A lawyer I spoke with said that if a CEO is unable to do his or her job due to illness, the board must disclose it. If Jobs's pancreatic cancer surgery kept him away from doing the CEO's job, how did Apple's lawyers defend the failure to disclose? It surely couldn't have been the lack of materiality -- some estimated that if his illness had been disclosed, Apple stock would have lost 20% of its value.

Meanwhile, the 2001 backdating allegations appear to constitute a clear legal problem. Jobs was trying to retain top employees after the dot-com crash and wanted to give them valuable options as an incentive to stay. He picked January 16 for the executive team grant, a date when Apple shares still had a nice low closing price. By February 7th when the board signed the papers for the grant, the stock was up 23%.

The SEC alleges that Apple -- by giving executives in-the-money options worth either $1.6 million or $3.9 million -- had violated the law. The SEC charges that Apple had engaged in illegal backdating, awarding in-the-money options without disclosing it and inflating company earnings by failing to record the $18.9 million expense on its financial statements. Did Jobs have a role in encouraging the board to approve these violations?

These questions about whether Jobs has pushed Apple's board to overstep its legal obligations are troubling. No doubt Apple shareholders hope those questions are behind Apple and that Jobs is now working on the next big thing.

When a company is so dependent on one person, investors can be taken for a wild ride.

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned.