Satyam directors mere rubber stamps: CBI

Mumbai: Satyam founder Ramalinga Raju and his relatives wrongfully made gains of Rs 2,743 crore from the company and "not even a single dissent note" was made by the software major's board, said the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Sunday.

The CBI, which is investigating the country’s largest corporate scam, said all the directors on the board of the company had acted as "rubber stamps".

"Meetings were conducted in perfunctory manner. In the meetings, the promoters were always present to influence the decisions. There were no open discussions," said J L Negi, a general manager with the Reserve Bank of currently on deputation with the CBI.

The Satyam scam, which was revealed in early 2009, washed away over Rs 14,000 crore from the investors' kitty while Ramalinga Raju and his relatives allegedly gained Rs 2,700 crore through alleged fraudulent dealings in shares.

The CBI has allegedly found that top officials of Satyam and the auditors defrauded the company by making manual entries into the accounts of fraudulent sales, Negi said.

The manual entries were the first piece of evidence against the accused and the next was to find out the authors of these invoices. "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.

The CBI is working with the Enforcement Directorate to attach the properties the accused had purchased with the proceeds from the fraud. "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."

About the CBI's future action in the investigation, Negi said: "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 V S P Gupta.