Two significant developments, two significant companies. And initially, it looks like a study in contrasts.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer has charged ousted Hewlett-Packard chairwoman Patricia Dunn and four others with conspiracy and fraud for their roles in the hamfisted company probe to track down media leaks, reports Bloomberg.

In the absence of any evidence of wrongdoing, chief executive officer Mark Hurd has avoided prosecution which, according to analysts quoted in the Bloomberg report, now allows the company to move on.

Yeah right, they would say that.

Hurd hasn't been charged but he's not off the hook completely. As deputy Attorney General Robert Anderson told Bloomberg: ''We haven't cleared anyone. There is no evidence that would lead us to file charges against anyone else at this time."

Meanwhile, there are reports that legal experts can't agree whether the charges are going to stick.

It goes like this: if you know you're participating in something that you know is against the law, you could be in deep trouble. On the other hand, there's the view that the statutes Lockyer was citing don't really address pretexting.

All of which suggests that the court proceedings are going to be long, drawn-out and messy. Not real good for the company.

By way of contrast, there's the news report of Apple boss Steve Jobs trying to clear the decks, and distance himself from the backdating scandal at Apple, by apologising to shareholders and employees, swearing it was out of character for the company and promising that it will do everything possible to make sure it will never happen again.

What a difference! Well, at least on the surface.

Jobs' apology is very different from Mark Hurd's minimimalist mea culpa last month.

Jobs has gone out of his way to try and present himself as transparent, claiming he knew about the backdated options but didn't benefit from them.

Compare that with Hurd's strained responses in this awkward interview with Fortune's Adam Lashinsky.

Hurd says the buck stops with him but as Lashinsky points out, it hasn't. It's stopped with Patricia Hurd and former general counsel Ann Baskins. Hurd's actually been promoted to chairman.

And as Hurd implies, there's only so much he can do to make things better:

"If you're thinking of a magic bullet, life doesn't work that way. Business doesn't work that way. Everybody always shows up and asks for magic strategic dust or operational dust to solve everything. And the answer is you don't. It's hard work, making sure that you continue to ... go to work."

On the other hand, Steve Jobs isn't off the hook completely either. Apple's attempt to come clean raises more questions than answers, says Arik Hesseldahl at BusinessWeek.

Can we be sure Jobs didn't benefit at all? Where is this sitting with the Securities and Exchange Commission? How are the restatements of its accounts going to pan out? What about back taxes? And so on.

Seth Jayson at Motley Fool goes even further. He calls it a bizarre semantic exercise which shows that Apple is rotten at the core:

"And as for this sort of behavior being "out of character for Apple," go ahead and pull the other one, Steve. I've always felt that Jobs put shareholders at the back of the line while building his iEmpire. Just take a look at the share dilution, running nearly 9% per year for the past two years. Apple is incredibly generous to insiders. Directors, for example, get $50,000 per year in cash, plus 10,000 options, immediately vested and exercisable - that's worth another $750,000 per year at today's prices. Oh, yeah, and because $800,000 a year is such a hardship, directors also get two free Apple computer systems per year."


This is where the stories of the two companies converge. Clearly, there's still a lot of water to go under both bridges.