Satyam directors acted like 'rubber stamps'

The CBI, conducting investigations into the accounting scam of Satyam Computers, today said all the directors on the board of the beleaguered firm had acted as "rubber stamps" and "not even a single dissent note" was recorded during the board meetings.

"Meetings were conducted in perfunctory manner. In the meetings, the promoters were always present to influence the decisions. There were no open discussions," J L Negi, RBI General Manager currently on deputation with the CBI, said at a CBI workshop here.

The multi-billion Satyam scam, which had hit the headlines in early 2009, washed away over Rs 14,000 crore from the investors' kitty while the accused Ramalinga Raju and his relatives had allegedly made a handsome Rs 2,700 crore through fraudulent dealings in shares.

The investigators have found majority of the Satyam top brass and the auditors of the company as guilty in the fraud. The case is being heard in a court in Hyderabad, he said.

The first piece of evidence was nailed after the investigating agency found out that there were manual entries made in the system to include fraudulent sales, Negi said. The next step was to find out the authors of these invoices, he said.

"We realised that the culprits were smart and were using computers which could not be tracked. We used the data in the office entry swipe machines and found that a set of people used to come to office during the night, usually towards the end of the quarter or the month, to generate fictitious invoices," Negi said.    

Negi further said that "with a team of 25 officers and another 40 investigators, the benchmark to file the chargesheet has been meet.

"There will be one more chargesheet in this case apart from the supplementary chargesheet that has already been filed," he said.

Besides, the Enforcement Directorate is working on the issue of attachment of properties of the accused, including those purchased with the proceeds from the crime, he said.

"Under the criminal law ordinance Act, 100 properties of Rs three crore have been mapped till date. Others include the land that has been purchased across various states," Negi said.

On the agency's future action, Negi said that "it will now approach the courts in the respective states to reach a judicial conclusion on them."

Apart from Ramalinga Raju, other accused include --Ramaraju, V Srinivas, S Gopalakrishnan, T Srinivas, B Suryanarayana Raju, G Ramakrishna, D Venkatapathi Raju, Srisailam Chetkuru and VSP Gupta.