Where are you getting this from? Is this from the complaint? Or a personal anecdote?
I worked there in 2006. The SVP of Eng was Alan Eustace. He's a jolly guy, he chuckles a lot. I don't remember this specific exchange but I can hear his chuckle in my head. Knowing him, the chuckle would almost certainly be laughing at what an obviously terrible idea it would be to delete the emails. Alan Eustace certainly would not have instructed people, explicitly nor implicitly, to delete messages subject to legal hold.
Personal anecdote, personal interpretation (though shared by colleagues I discussed this with at the time who also heard the tone and phrasing of the words first hand). The SVP would never tell anyone to delete emails, and he did not do so! Did I make that clear? He did NOT do so. He definitely DID NOT want us to DELETE ANY EMAILS! No SVP would have publicly instructed anyone to do so.
Unrelatedly, I would not have believed you at the time if you told me that the then CEO had entered into an illegal mutual non-solicit agreement with Apple (and Intel, Adobe, and others), suppressing employee pay by agreeing not to recruit or hire each other's workers. History and a successful class action lawsuit revealed a different story.
I can see how an awkwardly-delivered statement could by misconstrued, regardless of the speaker's true intent. However, doesn't this play out pretty poorly for the rank-and-file anyhow? Anyone caught deleting emails would get thrown under the bus by management citing the explicit instruction.
I worked there in 2006. The SVP of Eng was Alan Eustace. He's a jolly guy, he chuckles a lot. I don't remember this specific exchange but I can hear his chuckle in my head. Knowing him, the chuckle would almost certainly be laughing at what an obviously terrible idea it would be to delete the emails. Alan Eustace certainly would not have instructed people, explicitly nor implicitly, to delete messages subject to legal hold.