That quote is brilliant.

Corporate communications has playbook damage control responses, and this quote seems to be suggesting that the quoted response is one of them (it's "familiar").

Whether "former employees" are sketchily operating from playbooks, who knows. Because PR playbook-sounding statements don't have a lot of credibility.

Innocent until proven guilty.

Or the PR team undermines their own credibility with a stock and specious fact-free non-response.

I think the point of these is to dodge the even guiltier look of “no comment”. And signal there won’t be any potentially costly cooperative engagement from their side to their shareholders.

They don’t expect to be believed.