Correct. Story seems to be, Wistron was screwing over employees to save costs, and used those low-costs to secure a deal with Apple. Then they got caught by the government, and now have to play by the rules. Because of this, they asked Apple for more money, and Apple said no. So now the deal is done.
The deal really shouldn’t have happened in the first place, had Wistron played fair from day one.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> Back in 2020, there was a major riot at its Bangalore plant over underpaid wages, with millions of dollars’ worth of damage done. Both the Indian government and Apple investigated, and both found that Wistron was indeed guilty of serious labor law violations, including underpayment of its workers.
