Raju sentenced to six months' jail in Satyam scam

The Special Economic Offences Wing court at Nampally here on Monday convicted former chairman of Satyam Computers B Ramalinga Raju, his brother B Rama Raju and eight others in a multi-crore scam involving the IT firm.

Special judge BVLN Chakravarthi also slapped Raju with a fine of Rs 5 lakh and six months of imprisonment for fraud.

The Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) had filed this case three years ago. Out of the seven cases that Raju faced, the court quashed one and awarded the sentence in the remaining six.

The Raju brothers have to pay a fine of Rs 10 lakh each in five different cases, and have been sentenced to six months in jail in each one of four cases, taking the quantum of the sentence to two years.

Satyam former director Ram Mynampati has been sentenced to one and a half years in jail and will pay Rs 30 lakh fine (six months' imprisonment and Rs 10 lakh fine in each of three cases). The judge has given one month for the convicted to appeal the verdict. The court was silent on whether the imprisonment would run concurrently or separately.

According to CBI special prosecutor K Surender, Satyam former directors Krishna G Palepu, N Srinivas, Vinod Kadam and T K Prasad were fined Rs 20,000 each.
Ex-CFO Vadlamani Srinivas was sentenced to six months in jail in three cases. The court acquitted others.

The other accused include former PricewaterhouseCoopers auditors Subramani Gopalakrishnan and T Srinivas, B Suryanarayana Raju,another brother of Raju, former Satyam employees G Ramakrishna, D Venkatpathi Raju and Ch Srisailam, and Satyam's former internal chief auditor V S Prabhakar Gupta.

Raju was arrested by the Crime Investigation Department of the Andhra Pradesh Police along with his brother Rama Raju and others.

All the accused had spent various periods in custody after the Satyam episode hit the headlines in January 2009.

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

Raju and others were bailed out in 2012 after almost two years in judicial custody and about a month in police custody. Thus, Raju might not go back to jail as his judicial custody period is almost the same as his final term.

Another case in relation to the CBI probe in the case is pending for judgment on December 23.

The scam came to light on 7 January, 2009, after Raju allegedly confessed to falsifying account books and inflating profits over many years to the tune of several crores.

The CBI took over the investigation in February 2009 and filed three charge sheets (on April 7, 2009, November 24, 2009, and January 7, 2010), which were later combined.

Raju and the others were charged with offences ranging from cheating, criminal conspiracy, forgery and breach of trust under relevant sections of the IPC, for inflating invoices and incomes, account falsification, faking fixed deposits and falsifying returns in violation of various income tax laws.

During the trial, the CBI alleged that the scam caused a loss of Rs 14,000 crore to Satyam's shareholders.

 The defence countered, saying that 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 the law.