Posted on: 07-01-09 07:30:11
It appears that Satyam is in deep trouble. Rehash of Enron. But nothing will happen as Raju has powerful political backers including Naidu and Reddy . May be he will face courts in US as Satyam is listed on NASDAQ.
Here is the letter from the chairman, Raju:
http://im.rediff.com/money/2009/jan/07satyam-the-letter-raju-wrote.pdf
Wow. Unbelievable. I had a very high regard for Satyam...if not as much as Infosys. It was really one of those giants...hard to believe what has happened. Thanks for the post. I read a few other articles as well...will have to follow the fall-out from this.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
If you have a gun, you can rob a bank.
If you have a bank, you can rob everyone.
- Bill Maher
If this fellow goes unpunished then it will really show how deeply corrupt India has become.Greed will always get you--although he claims he did not benefit from this scam!
May be this is the sign of a superpower as only in these that we have Enron,IAGs and now Satyam.God help India
... that such things would start to pop up... let's hope that this is an isolated incident and other big boys are clean or else India's vision of becoming a super power could come shattering down. .
I feel for the folks working at Satyam. I was in Houston when Enron scandal came out and it was not a pretty sight seeing hundreds of people standing on the streets with their belongings in their hands wondering what had just hit them. Among them were our fellow Indians standing and staring in dismay as they were on H1 and that meant that they only had 10 days to look for another job or leave USA... it was a horrible time....
In these kinds of financial scandals, the part I find more incredulous is the role of the audit firms, PWC in this case.
In almost every case, the auditors are top notch financial consultance firms, usually among the big 5.
In the case of Enron it was Arthur Anderson.
This time it is PWC.
How can audit firms not realize what is going on year after year after year.
Worldcom had been falsifying their books for many years and so was Enron.
How can this kind of fraud go unnoticed by internal as well as external accountants?
Enron finished Arthur Anderson, so there was some justice in the end.
I think PWC should be similarly held accountable.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Mah deah, there is much more money to be made in the destruction of civilization than in building it up."
-- Rhett Butler in "Gone with the Wind"
They are paid the big bucks to uncover scandals but even bigger bucks to cover them. I'm sure that if they are pulled into this, they'll cover their butts. They must have some sort of a legal blanket else the likes of Arthur Anderson would have been long gone after ENRON.
Quote:Arthur Anderson is indeed gone.
Originally posted by guptamik
They are paid the big bucks to uncover scandals but even bigger bucks to cover them. I'm sure that if they are pulled into this, they'll cover their butts. They must have some sort of a legal blanket else the likes of Arthur Anderson would have been long gone after ENRON.
Gone for good.
That company has been dissolved, lock stock and barrel.
And it happened soon after the Enron scandal.
Worldcom was probably the last nail in the coffin.
What is surprising is that since then, a lot of other scams have come to light that had been covered up by Arthur Anderson, such as the United Baptist Church multi-million dollar scam in Arizona dating back from the mid 1990s.
There have been other ones too.
PWC, one of the former Big 5, is equally liable.
The scale of Satyam will obviously not be as large as Enron and Worldcom and the fact that it is in a third-world country will mean that PWC will mostly get away with this.
But given the fact that Satyam is a Nasdac listed company with huge operations in the US and Canada (Scotia Bank, Bombardier, etc.) PWC is hugely accountable.
Had this been a US based company, I'm sure the creditors and common shareholders of the company would have gone after PWC as well.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Mah deah, there is much more money to be made in the destruction of civilization than in building it up."
-- Rhett Butler in "Gone with the Wind"
