Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and chief executive, has officially returned to work after a five-month medical leave. But for some investors the issues raised by Apple’s secrecy about Mr. Jobs’s health problems and liver transplant are likely to linger.
“Steve is back to work,” Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, said Monday. “He is currently at Apple a few days a week and working from home the remaining days.”
As was the case with Mr. Jobs’s leave, his return to work was accompanied by only minimal disclosures.
Mr. Dowling declined to say whether Mr. Jobs’s role had changed or to discuss the chief executive’s health. He also would not say when Mr. Jobs had first returned to work at Apple. Mr. Jobs was at work on the corporate campus a week ago, according to a person who saw him there.
The Apple chief’s official return comes just before the self- imposed deadline for his medical leave. When Apple announced his leave in January, the company said he would be back at work by the end of June.
Mr. Jobs underwent a liver transplant about two months ago, but word of the operation did not surface until this month. Last week, a hospital in Tennessee confirmed that he had had surgery and said his prognosis was excellent.
News of the operation rekindled a controversy among shareholders and corporate governance experts about Apple’s scant disclosures about the health of Mr. Jobs, a survivor of pancreatic cancer. His return to work is not likely to quell the debate.
“We don’t know much,” said Charles M. Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. “We know he is back at work and that he had a transplant. Given how important he seems to be to the value of this business, we ought to…