Eddy Cue

When Apple goes before a federal appeals court on Dec. 15, trying to overturn the ebooks price-fixing judgment the Justice Department won against it in July 2013, there will be an elephant in the room.

That would be Amazon, the much admired and greatly feared ­discounter, which is not a party in the case. Yet the unposed question hovering over the proceedings will be: Did the regulators target the right bully?

The case stems from events that occurred five years ago, when Apple was preparing to launch its first iPad. Apple's negotiator extraordinaire, Eddy Cue

Eddy Cue, the alleged "ringmaster" of a conspiracy to raise e-book prices in 2010, returns to a Manhattan federal court Monday in the final four days of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Apple (AAPL).

Having sailed through a grilling Thursday by the government's lawyer, the star witness of U.S.A. v. Apple will complete the friendly questioning that Apple's chief counsel began Thursday afternoon.

Among the topics they are expected to cover Monday are a dinner with Macmillan's CEO that the government finds suspicious and a "smoking gun" e-mail from Steve Jobs

Apple’s head of iTunes, Eddy Cue, will testify Thursday as the central witness in the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the tech giant for allegedly conspiring to raise e-book prices.

According to prosecutors, Cue was the chief liaison between Apple — under late founder Steve Jobs — and five publishers, all trying to create a new model for e-book sales that would raise prices above Amazon’s average $9.99 offerings.

Prosecutors said Cue coordinated a joint plan for the publishers to move away from Amazon’s wholesale e-books model.

Apple Inc. engaged in a horizontal price-fixing scheme with some of the U.S.’s largest publishers to violate antitrust laws by working “to strip retailers of pricing authority,” the U.S. Justice Department said in a court filing.

The department’s Antitrust Division filed papers for a trial set to begin June 3 in federal court in Manhattan that included excerpts of e-mails and depositions of Apple executives including the company’s late founder, Steve Jobs, and Senior Vice President Eddy Cue and publishing executives.