About Satyam Scam!!

Managers at the outsourcing company Satyam Computer Services spun an elaborate web of fraud to attract customers and investors, while using stakes in the company to raise cash for themselves, according to a report filed by India’s top investigation agency.
The deception played out over at least eight years, involved dual accounting books, more than 7,000 forged invoices, dozens of fake bank statements, thousands of unnecessary employees and auditors who received fees several times the market rate, according to a charge sheet filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation in a court in Hyderabad.

The 77-page document details the scope of the fraud at Satyam, and lays out the bureau’s case for charging six company managers, their PricewaterhouseCoopers auditors and an adviser with cheating, forgery and falsification of accounts.

Satyam managers, including the founding brothers B. Ramalinga and B. Rama Raju “were able to attract prospective customers and investors by making them believe” that the company was “carrying out huge volumes of business,” the report said.

The details of the bureau’s investigation could bolster a string of class-action suits pending against Satyam managers and auditors.

Tech Mahindra, a joint venture between the Indian conglomerate Mahindra & Mahindra and BT Group, won an auction to take over Satyam on April 13 with a bid valuing the company at $1.1 billion. The deal may still need to clear regulatory hurdles in the United States and Europe.

The Raju family and their friends, which held 19 percent of Satyam when it went public in 1992, “made hay when the sun was shining” by selling shares as they carried out the fraud, the bureau said in its report. More than 300 investment companies were started, some of which used loans backed by shares to invest in real estate and agriculture, the report said. Banks issuing the loans included Deutsche Investments India, GE Capital Services and DSP Merrill Lynch.

Like many companies, Satyam had a multistep process for taking customer orders, calculating what the work would cost and generating invoices. Managers in different departments checked and crosschecked the figures as they passed through the system.

But employees in the accounts receivable team could also practice “emergency generating of invoices” which bypassed most of the steps, the bureau report said.

From the beginning of April 2003 to the end of 2008, nearly 75,000 of these special invoices were created. Of these, 7,561 were fraudulent, generated to make Satyam look as if it had more business than it did.

The invoices named 11 different Indian companies but were never received by those customers, the report said, based on conversations with the companies. From 2004 until the fraud came to light when B. Ramalinga Raju confessed in January, sales were inflated 18 percent a quarter on average, for a total of about 42.6 billion rupees ($840 million).

Satyam has claimed that the invoices were paid through the New York branch of Bank of Baroda, on Park Avenue in Manhattan. But the bank said it received no such payments, according to the report. To back the invoices, the managers falsely inflated the percentage of employees that it said were working “onsite,” or on profitable projects, the bureau said.

A part of the inflated sales were recorded in Satyam’s books as debt every quarter, using forged monthly bank statements, the bureau said. By the quarter ended September 2008, that fictitious debt totaled about $100 million.

Every quarter, the Raju brothers and two finance executives received both the actual and falsified sales figures, the bureau said. A copy of the dual reports was retrieved from the e-mail box of the chief financial officer, Srinivas Vadlamani.

The company’s auditors, S. Gopala Krishnan and Srinivas Talluri, who have been suspended from PricewaterhouseCoopers, both received figures from Satyam’s banks that were in “great variance with the figures provided by the management” but certified Satyam’s accounts anyway, the bureau said. In return, the bureau claims, the auditors received an “exorbitant audit fee” over and above the market rate.

In an e-mailed statement, the global director of communications for PricewaterhouseCoopers, Mike Davis, said “We are aware that charges have been leveled against the two PW partners. We are yet to engage with the partners on the contents of the charge sheet and therefore we are not able to comment at this stage.”

Both brothers are accused of forging receipts for bank deposits and destroying the forgeries. Satyam’s founding brothers, the company’s chief financial officer and the two PricewaterhouseCoopers auditors remain in jail in Hyderabad.

Investment companies created in the names of the brothers’ wives, children and even their mother were used to hold proceeds from selling shares and from borrowing 17.4 billion rupees ($350 million) from finance companies.