Satyam Everywhere

I was never a news or current affairs fanatic. But for past 2 days there is news about Satyam everywhere. So I started reading about it and following the news a little bit. I could see the mocking of the company name every where in the news papers and the news channels. I heard the news of the golden peacock award which they got in 2008 has been revoked.

It has been in the news in recent times for all the wrong reasons. The bribery case with World Bank, the attempt to take stake in Maytas and now the financial misreporting. I was personally shocked when I heard the news of the bribery case at such a high level. But the financial misreporting is something beyond anybody wildest imaginations.

In all this news there is one thing that I could not understand. Media has been reporting that Satyam's Maytas acquisition was a means to move the money to the Raju family. After reading further details, now I am seriously doubting it. I felt that it was a sincere step from Raju to save Satyam. Since Satyam had a huge deficit between reported earnings and the actual earnings, may be he was trying to correct the records with an acquisition.

It would have been something like buying stake in the company and transferring money on the records. This would have filled the gap for the deficit in Satyam's records. Now the question is how would this step help the Raju family? From the news I see that the Raju family has only a 10% stake in Satyam while they have 100% and 40% stake in the Maytas companies. So I sincerely feel that this step by Raju was a sincere try to correct his mistakes and save Satyam. As I told I am not that news follower and cannot really disagree with the whole media, but then the point here seems to be logical for me.

Now all the focus is on Satyam. But today I have seen one more statement from KPMG saying that it would be very difficult for one person to do such a huge accounting fraud. Hence this statement would raise fingers against Price Waterhouse Coopers as they were the accounting firm for Satyam and it is tough to believe that a scandal of such scale managed to avoid the eyes of the accounting firm. I got this thought after reading about Enron and as Enron collapsed in a somewhat similar situation, Arthur Andersen went down with it.

What ever may happen to Satyam or PWC, I am just hoping some good to happen to all those 53000 employees associated with Satyam.