The board, whose size was doubled with the induction of three members on Thursday, is likely to elect a new chairman to steer the company out of the financial mess that its founder Ramalinga Raju led it into.
Satyam's expanded board will meet on Saturday with the focus on raising funds to keep the business alive and may also have to deal with complaints on its choice of auditor to restate the company's financials.
Talks of a possible merger or takeover will not have credence for a while
Despite no real change in the economics governing their industry, coinciding with the lean season, low fares on domestic sectors -- as promised by the airlines -- are suddenly back. The drop in fares, in many instances, is quite significant.
Those involved in Satyam have also been fudging carbon credits but they get away as there is no penalty. Ever
In an hour-long chat on rediff.com on Monday, Ganesh Natarajan, chairman of National Association of Software and Service Companies, replied to many queries on the Satyam scam.
Maytas Properties and Maytas Infra are promoted by Raju's family and have interests in realty and construction. Noting that there is no problem with the Maytas accounts, Bhatt said all the exposure are collateralised and accounts are regular.
The application moved by the Securities and Exchange Board of India to record the statements of Ramalinga Raju was also deferred to January 16 by the court.
"It defies logic, one is not sure whether there is much more to it than is written in the letter and whether the letter contains all the facts," KPMG chief operating officer Richard Rekhy said on the sidelines of a CII function in New Delhi. It is too simplistic at the moment to believe that the kind of thing that has happened in the company is done by Raju alone, he said.
The team first went to Raju's house for an inspection, but returned on finding it locked. It had earlier issued summons for him to appear before the team.
Scandal-hit Satyam Computer Services is likely to abandon its proposed IT park project in Gandhinagar in view of the multi-crore fraud in the Hyderabad-based software firm, Gujarat government officials said on Friday.
For the whole world B Ramalinga Raju may be a villain, after the startling revelation of fraud in the company he founded, but for residents of his native village in West Godavari district, he is still a good Samaritan.
The official said that L&T did not jack up its stake in Satyam in recent times and the stake the group owns was acquired in phases from the secondary market. Speculations were rife that the engineering major might look at acquiring Satyam in order to strengthen its presence in the information and technology arena where it has presence through L&T Infotech, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the group.
One of the Rajus, chairman of non-banking finance company Nagarjuna Finance, K S Raju, was arrested for defaulting on repayments of public deposits worth around Rs 100 crore (Rs 1 billion).
The fact that Satyam's reputed auditors kept quiet while it cooked its books is reminiscent of the Enron-Andersen days.
PwC's comments are still awaited. Following a letter from the Satyam chairman, who accepted that he had misrepresented facts in the company's balance sheet, role of auditors and accountants for the company has also come under scanner.
Satyam's last month's gaffe of transferring funds to promoter group companies by buying stakes in the latter already raised a stink. It led us to doubt the faith that investors had put on a company's management, its independent directors, auditors, consultants and rating agencies.
Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy said on Wednesday he was not aware of the details of the Satyam Computer financial fraud, and would take appropriate action after studying the case. Reddy was in New Delhi for a meeting with Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia.
Years after the foreign media wondered if Americans should be afraid of Ramalinga Raju more than Osama Bin Laden beacuse of jobs they lost to India, experts said on Wednesday the fear seems to have come true, although for a different reason. While the context has changed completely, the level of financial wrongdoing revealed today by Raju at Satyam makes him a feared man in the corporate world, another analyst said.
B Teja Raju, the elder son of Saytam Computer chief B Ramalinga Raju, on Saturday took over additional charge of chief executive officer of Maytas Infra in place of P K Madhav, who was arrested on December 16, 2008 in connection with the Nagarjuna Finance depositors' case.
In what could bring some respite to Maytas Infra, which is caught in a controversy after Satyam aborted its bid to acquire it, the Andhra Pradesh government refused to see the Satyam issue as a factor that would impact the Rs 12,000-crore (Rs 120 billion) Hyderabad Metro Rail (HMR) project, which is being executed by a Maytas-led consortium.
December 16, 2008 is a day two high-profile corporate honchos from Andhra Pradesh will not forget in a hurry.
India is keen to 'grab opportunities' from China in the booming offshore engineering services space, R Ramalinga Raju, chairman, Nasscom said on Friday.
The fact it is promoted by kin of disgraced Satyam founder Ramalinga Raju is continuing to haunt Maytas Infrastructure, although it has a healthy order book of Rs 8,000 crore (Rs 80 billion) and is no longer run on a day to day basis by Teja Raju.
"Now if there is somebody who knows about the confession (and) wants to buy (or sell) at price 'X', should we as a regulator be coming in the way?" C B Bhave, chairman of Securities and Exchange Board of India, told PTI. His first reaction on receipt of Raju's e-mail was, however, that of disbelief.
'It is revealed that an amount of Rs 1,425 crore out of Rs 1,744 crore loan obtained from NBFCs was transferred to the bank accounts of SCSL by 37 companies as loan over a period ranging from November 17, 2006 to October 30, 2008 to meet the expenses of the Satyam Computer Services Limited. Out of this amount, Rs 194 crore was returned by SCSL during October and November 2008 to 15 out of the 37 companies,' the CBI said in its chargesheet.
Satyam founder Ramalinga Raju was honest at least about his dishonest dealings, with CBI finding that balance sheets were inflated by Rs 5,020 crore (Rs 50.20 billion) almost the same amount disclosed by the former IT posterboy.
IL&FS Financial Services has acquired 14.5 per cent stake in Maytas Infra, promoted by former Satyam chairman B Ramalinga Raju's kin, through invocation of pledge and off-market transactions.
CBI director Ashwani Kumar said the Satyam fraud was unique, as it was the founder, and not an outsider, who is the accused. According to sources, the fraud involves an amount that is much bigger than the Rs 7,800 crore (Rs 78 billion) estimated originally. It could be close to Rs 10,000 crore (Rs 100 billion) based on over 7,000 fake invoices and forged documents retrieved by the agency.
In a filing to the Bombay Stock Exchange, Maytas Infra said a meeting of the board of directors of the company will be held on Thursday to appoint Vaish and Jain as directors of the company in accordance with the order of the Company Law Board. Former ICAI president Ved Jain and noted tax lawyer O P Vaish were named as new board members of Maytas Infra following CLB directing the government to appoint four nominee directors, including a chairman, on the company's board.
Maytas Infra will now have to submit a Rs 240 crore bank guarantee and will get a 60 day breather by paying a penalty. "The global recession and the consequent credit squeeze in national and international capital markets has created a force majeure situation. Besides, the ongoing PIL (filed by an NGO) is having an extremely deleterious effect on our ability to achieve the financial closure," said the company.
At the end of seven-day custody of the accused, the CBI counsel informed the designated court that the agency is yet to complete the interrogation and wanted two more days of their custody.
The arguments were made by the government before the CLB, which is considering a petition by the government for removal of the board of Maytas Properties. The CLB is likely to pass the order later. The government also alleged that the valuation of Maytas Properties by the consultancy firm was done in a day.
A growing number of companies are in an innovation mode to engage employees in the wallet, mind and heart.
At a time when almost 90 per cent of my Satyam friends are cribbing about the fraud and betrayal by (former Satyam chairman) B Ramalinga Raju, I have a slightly different opinion.
Re-constructing what Mr Raju did, that was the key shortcoming in his plan for grand larceny. The more you think of what has happened to Satyam and its jailed chairman, the more obvious it becomes that the problem was the failure to realise that while he might get away with stealing eggs, the goose itself should not be killed.
Satyam may have been loaded with funds of over Rs 5,000 crore as on September 2008, but it could have been left with just Rs 200 crore of maturable fixed deposits by the time IT firm's founder Ramalinga Raju revealed financial fraud on January 7.
Despite its success, EMRI is as much under a cloud today as its founder Ramalinga Raju, with a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court questioning the way he got 12 state governments to implement it and reimburse 95 per cent of its expenses. The key issue is that the states entrusted Rs 18 billion annually (if 10,000 vans are to run in all the states by next year) to a private company without going through a transparent selection procedure.
Shares of Maytas Infra hit its lower circuit just after opening, to halt trading at Rs 105, down 4.99 per cent on the Bombay Stock Exchange. A similar fate was faced on the National Stock Exchange, where the scrip touched an intra-day low of Rs 105.40, down five per cent. A total of 971 shares got traded on both the bourses.
That the value of brand Satyam would be eroded many times over, following its former chairman Ramalinga Raju's admission that he had cooked the company's books, was a given.
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