B Ramalinga Raju didn’t take just shareholders and investors for a ride in Satyam. Employees too had fallen prey to the con game. The generation of fake invoices to record non-existent business was not just a book entry to inflate the revenues — Raju had, in fact, formed teams of employees to work on products to be delivered as against these fake invoices. The employees working on these ‘projects’ were made to believe there were clients waiting for these products to be delivered.
According to the finds of the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI), the employees were also regularly sent emails about the product and project progress as if they were all coming from the clients abroad. But the emails were fake and were used only to keep the employees engaged.
The CBI has found that the finance in-charges and the core team of Raju faked the existence of at least seven projects. The number of people working on these projects is yet to be ascertained.
There was regular exchange of mails from the management to the employees to give an impression of the keen interest of management in execution of these projects.
The investigation also found the invoices do not match with the ledgers of banks with which Satyam had transacted in the US.
“However, the ledgers maintained by Satyam were dishonestly and fraudulently forged pertaining to these seven customers to incorporate the collections pertaining to all the 63 invoices,” the CBI said in its latest chargesheet.
What has caught the investigators by surprise is the way the emails to employees for monitoring the progress of the fake projects were generated.
The CBI found that they were all generated from Hyderabad. “Detailed analysis of the emails revealed that the internet protocol addresses from which the emails were sent at the relevant time and date were all from within Hyderabad itself, which clearly shows that such emails have never emanated from these seven foreign customers. Further, it was also established that these emails were relayed by the Rediffmail server which has got a paid service facility called Domain Services, which facilitates its clients to create email IDs at their own domain names. In this case, it was found that the payments for the said services were made through Bank of Baroda Visa credit card which belongs to D Venkatapathy Raju (one of the accused),” the chargesheet said.
These email IDs were freely used by the core team working on fabricating the accounts to give sanctity to the fake projects. “For the purpose of executing the projects, which were never delivered to the customers, the accused have wasted thousands of man hours of the associates of Satyam there by incurring a wasteful expenditure to the tune of Rs65.88 crore towards the salaries of the associates and other overheads,” the CBI said.
Comments