That doesn't compute: if they see it as a violation, they remove it, if they don't they ship it anyway.
Sometimes things just slip through and mistakes are made - this is pretty normal and product recalls happen all the time. What makes a policy violation different from a defective product in this regard?
I think they didn't view it as a violation, but outsiders did. Lego did the math and figured the production, shipping, marketing, recall, destruction of product, and loss of sales would cost less than potential bad publicity.
There is no such thing as a for-profit company that does things because it is "the right thing to do". They make decisions based on what will bring in the most profit (or result in the least amount of lost profit).
It wouldn't have gone through the year + process of becoming a product without this discussion and being over-ruled. Plenty of documentation out there on how lego selects a theme / item, designs, plans production, and releases a product. It passed theses rigors, but not the "mob".
> Plenty of documentation out there on how lego selects a theme / item, designs, plans production, and releases a product. It passed theses rigors, but not the "mob".
Again, the same can be said about recalled products as well - years of development and planning and even post-production QA, yet f-ups happen all the time.