Court reserves judgement in Satyam case

A local court trying the case of multi-crore accounting fraud in erstwhile Satyam Computer Services Limited on Monday reserved its judgement while asking all the accused to appear before it on September 15.

"The court has not given any date for judgement.

“The judgement is reserved. As and when it is ready, it will be notified and pronounced.

“The accused were asked to appear on September 15," CBI special public prosecutor K Surender said.

The 10 accused in the case include prime accused Satyam Computers founder and former chairman B Ramalinga Raju, his brother and Satyam's former MD B Rama Raju, ex-CFO Vadlamani Srinivas, former PwC auditors Subramani Gopalakrishnan and T Srinivas, Raju's another brother B Suryanarayana Raju, former employees G Ramakrishna, D Venkatpathi Raju and Ch Srisailam, and Satyam's former internal chief auditor V S Prabhakar Gupta.

The trial in Satyam fraud case had concluded in second half of June before the special court, which examined 216 witnesses and marked 3,038 documents during the course of the hearing.

Touted as the country's biggest accounting fraud, the scam came to light on January 7, 2009 after Raju allegedly confessed to manipulating his company's account books and inflating profits over many years to the tune of several crores of rupees.

Raju was arrested by the Crime Investigation Department of Andhra Pradesh Police two days later along with his brother.

In February that year, CBI took over the investigation and filed three charge sheets (on April 7, 2009, November 24, 2009 and January 7, 2010), which were later clubbed into one.

Raju and others were charged with offences ranging from cheating, criminal conspiracy, forgery, breach of trust under relevant sections of IPC by way of inflating invoices and incomes, account falsification, faking fixed deposits, besides allegedly falsifying returns through violation of various I-T laws.

During the trial, the CBI alleged that the scam caused a loss of Rs 14,000 crore (Rs 140 billion) to Satyam shareholders, while the defence countered the charges, saying the accused were not responsible for the fraud and all the documents filed by the central agency relating to the case were fabricated and not according to law.

Image: A journalist walks inside the Satyam Computer Services head office in Hyderabad. ' Photograph: Krishnendu Halder/Reuters