India Charges 9 After Inquiry of Outsourcing Company

8, April-2009

NEW DELHI — India’s Central Bureau of Investigation concluded its investigation of the outsourcing company Satyam Computer Services on Tuesday, and charged nine people including auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers with forgery and fraud.

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After a 45-day investigation, the bureau said it was charging six people from Satyam Computer Services, two suspended auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers and an outside adviser with “criminal conspiracy, cheating, cheating by personification, forgery of valuable security, forgery for the purpose of cheating, using a forged document as genuine, falsification of accounts and for causing disappearance of evidence.”

Satyam, one of India’s top outsourcing companies, has been struggling since its chairman admitted in January that he had faked some $1 billion on the company’s balance sheet and inflated operating margins. India’s government and regulators have been under pressure to bring charges quickly to prevent customers from deserting the country’s crucial outsourcing industry.


The bureau said that charges were filed against Satyam founders and brothers B. Rama Raju and B. Ramalinga Raju, as well as the company’s former chief financial officer Srinivas Vadlamani, and three other Satyam employees from the finance division. It was not known if those three people have also left the company.

Satyam’s two auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers — S. Gopalakrishnan and Talluri Srinivas — were also charged, as was B. Suryanarayana Raju, the director of SRSR Advisory Services, who is the brother of the co-founders.

PricewaterhouseCoopers said in a statement it was “surprised and disappointed” that the bureau had pressed charges against the two partners who audited Satyam, and that it had found no “evidence of criminal wrongdoing on the part of either partner.”

The fraud perpetrated by Mr. Raju and others at Satyam “was designed to and did circumvent PW India’s audit process” PricewaterhouseCoopers said, and the auditors were victims of that fraud.

Several lawsuits have been filed by Satyam investors against PricewaterhouseCoopers, saying that the auditor should have noticed the fraud.

The bureau, akin to the F.B.I. in the United States, completed the investigation in a “record time of 45 days” it asserted in a statement, and filed a 300-page charge sheet citing 433 witnesses.