Nine months on, Satyam fraud still a riddle

Nine months after the Satyam scam, India’s biggest corporate fraud of $1.5 billion, the investigating agencies are yet to get their act together. On Sunday, corporate affairs minister Salman Khurshid said he was still awaiting the final report from accounting regulator Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) on its version of how the fraud unfolded. “I don’t know why it (ICAI report) is not coming. I am not able to understand what the delay is about”, the minister told agencies.

But an FE investigation found out that the process of getting B Ramalinga Raju, former chief of erstwhile Satyam, to court to face final charges will take quite some time. This is because a lot of work is still pending with all the four agencies tasked to track the Satyam accounting fraud. These agencies are the Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO), stock market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), ICAI and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

So far, the only step taken by the government for Raju’s trail is the plan to set up a special court for Satyam in Hyderabad.

To read the full article, click here...
To read the ePaper, visit: http://epaper.financialexpress.com