CBI pegs Satyam fraud at Rs 14,000 crore

Seven months after its first charge sheet in the Satyam scam, CBI on Tuesday filed a supplementary charge sheet against disgraced Satyam founder B Ramalinga Raju and nine others, pegging the Satyam fraud at Rs 14,000 crore instead of the Rs 7800 crore that Raju had owned up to in January this year.

The additional chargesheet however fails to nail Raju and aides on siphoning of funds from Satyam Computer, instead saying that the investigating agency was planning to file a separate chargesheet on the allegations of funds diversion and income-tax frauds within the next few days.

The 200-page chargesheet filed in the CBI court here, charged the accused of forging board resolutions and unauthorisedly obtaining loans worth Rs 1220 crore from banks as well as inflating Satyam revenues to the tune of Rs 430 crore by creating fake customers and generating fake invoices.

The chargesheet also identifies 1065 properties with a documented value of Rs 350 crore that were acquired by the Rajus with the spoils of the fraud. These include 6,000 acres of land, 40,000 sq yd of housing plots and 90,000 sq ft of built-up property.

CBI has also slapped charges of criminal breach of trust and falsifying accounts by inflating the acquisition price of Nipuna Services Ltd, the ITeS arm of Satyam. It also slapped a criminal breach of trust on them in the declaration and disbursal of dividends of Satyam Computers.

Meanwhile, the Rs 1220 crore unauthorized loans detailed by CBI in the chargesheet are not reflected in the company's books and are over and above the Rs 1230 crore that Raju confessed to Satyam having received from various Raju family owned companies including Maytas Infra and Maytas Properties.

The CBI, which on Saturday arrested Satyam's internal audit head VS Prabhakar Gupta making him the 10th accused, also charged the accused of criminal breach of trust in declaration and disbursement of dividends.