They might have suspected, but I doubt they formally knew. I would guess it was a type of "don't tell me, I don't want to know, plausible deniability and all".

Only suckers formally know anything.

There be dragons.

Better a high trust society with some checks and balances than one ruled by "don't write down anything" sociopaths.

tell that to the lawyers who make a living defending corporations and putting up legal firewalls of plausible deniability

If only incompetence was a crime.

Which one do you think you currently live in?

Regardless when it's in my power I'd rather encourage a high trust society.

To be clear, I don't like how it is. But if corporations have a personality, they either verge on or go full hog on sociopathic. Any corporate lawyer will tell management to not write down potentially incriminating.

The better among corporations actually try to do the right thing, most of the time. But of course, if there's some kind of incident, there's still a lockdown mentality.

They probably didn’t tell bc they wouldn’t get the deal.

Simple story. Just some more Apple bashing like always.

I would assume that Apple looked into it a little bit. US companies can get in trouble if their contractors abroad use slave labor, buy parts from the wrong country, or divert part of the contract to use as bribes. So I doubt this is a case where everyone at Apple laughed about how it was too good to be true, CC'd the lawyers, and the lawyers wrote back "yeah hahah".

At the end of the day, you can't always find everything even if you try really hard.

You can make it yourself if it is important enough.

Why would it be too good to be true? They might have simply won the deal but a small margin against a competitor.

They also might have hidden this info, or even fraudes their way through.

> I would guess it was a type of "don't tell me, I don't want to know, plausible deniability and all".

Imagine something like due diligence laws for making business contracts, so you can't really blame plausible deniability anymore.

That's the core idea behind the EU's supply chain laws. No matter what, anyone on the upper levels can get busted - it's a massive incentive for everyone to make sure their supply chain is not skirting around or openly sharting on laws. And it's also an incentive to not look the other way when you know that a vendor's bid is very very low.