Word: satyam
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...massive corporate scandal is a long delay even by the standards of India's sluggish judicial system. That's nearly how long it took for the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to get permission from the country's highest court to question the men who were running Satyam Computer Services, India's embattled information technology giant, over the company's $1 billion accounting fraud...
...Following a Feb. 3 Supreme Court ruling, officials from SEBI now have access to jailed Satyam founder and chairman Ramalinga Raju, his brother Rama Raju, and former chief financial officer Srinivas Vadlamani. Although the men are in police custody and face criminal charges, SEBI, the country's stock market regulator, is the only Indian body with the expertise to investigate allegations that Satyam officials used Byzantine accounting chicanery involving illegal transfers of money between hundreds of shell companies, possible insider trading, money laundering, and other acts to inflate the company's profits and defraud shareholders...
...delay may make it more difficult to unravel the case. The police took a week to seize documents from Satyam's auditors, and there are concerns that crucial papers have been destroyed. Two weeks after Raju's confession, the state police arrested his cousin, Gopalakrishna Raju, who heads a sister company, for "concealing and causing disappearance of evidence"- mainly documents related to property acquisitions. Although an independent body under the central Ministry of Corporate Affairs, the Serious Crimes Investigation Office, has been investigating the case, it has a mandate to look mainly at violations of corporate law and not issues...
...With the high court's blessing, SEBI may now be able to look into possible insider-trading violations revolving around the sale of 3,600,000 shares of Satyam stock in the months before the fraud came to light, as well as embezzlement and a host of other possible transgressions. According to reports in Indian newspapers, investigators for the Andhra Pradesh Crime Investigation Division have discovered Satyam funds were diverted into Maytas Properties and Maytas Infrastructure, property companies owned by the Raju family. Two senior partners of Satyam's auditors, Price Waterhouse, S. Gopalakrishnan and Srinivas Taluri, have also been...
...Monday, Indian newspapers reported that the board may appoint investment banks to explore the possibility of finding a buyer for Satyam. Since then, board member Tarun Das has said the company was approached by a potential buyer. Board members insist the company has solid cash flow and can continue. Yet with fresh revelations about Raju's alleged malfeasance surfacing every day - the latest, that he deleted all his e-mails from his final month as CEO - there are fears that the company's liabilities may be so high that it may be forced to fold...