Club chargesheets against Ramalinga Raju: Court

In a significant twist to the multi-crore Satyam scandal trial, a special court on Wednesday passed an order that all the three chargesheets filed by the CBI against Satyam Computers former chairman Ramalinga Raju and several other accused persons be clubbed together.

In his order, magistrate BVLN Chakravarti said that as there is enough evidence to show that all the offences form part of the same transaction, they can be tried jointly.

The CBI argued that though they have no objection to chargesheets one and three -- which relate to the main case -- being clubbed, chargesheet number two should be tried separately as it relates to violation of various income tax rules.

The CBI has so far filed three chargesheets in the Satyam case, and it is all set to file a fourth one on FEMA violations.

While the CBI accused Raju and the others of cheating, breach of trust by way of inflating invoices and incomes in the first and third chargesheets, the second one dealt with the accused allegedly falsifying returns through violation of various I-T laws.

Raju's battery of advocates argued that all the cases mentioned in the three chargesheets were interrelated and, therefore, could not be separated.

The defence counsel had also pointed out that 23 of the 26 witnesses mentioned by the CBI were same in all the cases. The magistrate, who was convinced by the defence counsel's argument, said, "It would not only be inconvenient, but also injudicious to try the cases separately. It would lead to unnecessary multiplicity of trials involving avoidable inconvenience to the witness and expenditure."

The court will also pronounce the orders on a petition filed by Rama Krishna (A7) and Venkatapati Raju (A8), requesting the court to allow them to use a computer in prison, on June 25. The accused informed the court that most of the documents related to the case were supplied in the form of CDs by the CBI.

The court also directed Chenchalguda prison authorities to submit a feasibility report on the use of a computer in prison. The jail authorities had informed the court that no such facilities were available there.