Union commerce minister Kamal Nath hinted at possible government intervention. He told TV channels that the government was “ready to assist’’ Satyam.
With the Congress facing both an assembly election and a Lok Sabha poll in Andhra Pradesh in April-May this year, the Manmohan Singh government is likely to come up with a financial bailout package for Satyam to help it tide over its present liquidity crunch.
Union commerce minister Kamal Nath hinted at possible government intervention on Monday. He told TV channels that the government was “ready to assist’’ Satyam and was waiting for the recommendations of the newly-constituted board of directors. A DNA story on Monday said the company would need immediate funds of Rs 500 crore to turn around, but banks may be unwilling to lend when they can’t be sure of the money coming back.
While new board member and HDFC chairman Deepak Parekh shied away from saying who would put up money for the beleaguered software company, he too indicated at a press conference on Monday evening that help may come from the government.
The Congress is gagging at the prospect of 53,000 Satyam employees becoming jobless overnight in an election year unless the company finds the resources to keep going until what Parekh called “receivables’’ start coming in. These are dues owed to Satyam from various clients, which Parekh said the new board is in the process of calculating.
The political stakes are very high for the Congress in Andhra Pradesh. It not only holds power in the state, as many as 30 of its Lok Sabha members are from here. In fact, it was the windfall from Andhra Pradesh that upset all calculations in the 2004 general elections and propelled the Congress-led UPA to power at the centre.
Apart from the possible loss of jobs, the Congress is worried about two other political minefields: the whiff of corruption scandals, and the possibility of the Andhra chief minister YS Rajasekhar Reddy (YSR) himself falling victim to it.
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