The government has constituted a new Satyam Board to restore its credibility which will convene in a very short time to put the
company back on rails. Chairman of HDFC Deepak Parekh and the former Nasscom chief Kiran Karnik have been named to the board. The government said the company can be expanded to include seven more directors. Satyam chairman will be decided by the new board. C Achuthan has also been appointed to board as director.
The new board will continue till further notice.
Corporate Affairs Minister Prem Chand Gupta tapped experts in technology, finance and the law to form the core of a new board for the company, which in the past week has seen its leadership arrested and its board dissolved.
“The board’s first priority would clearly be to restore the company’s credibility, customer confidence and employee morale,” Gupta said. “Such a board will provide the necessary vision, along with responsible and accountable leadership to the company in this hour of crisis.”
Gupta named the three to the board some 36 hours after he disbanded the previous board.
The new Satyam board will meet in 24 hours. “All options before the board are open, and it will decide what has to be done in the interests of the company.”Satyam, which is headquartered in the southern Andhra Pradesh state, employs 53,000 people - among the 2 million Indians working in the country’s booming high-tech industry, which last year brought in an estimated $40 billion. The company’s clients include a slew of Fortune 500 companies including Nestle, General Electric and Ford Motors.
Troubled tech giant Satyam’s woes started when its former chairman, B Ramalinga Raju, on Wednesday startled the world by admitting to a Rs 7,000-crore. After the company’s stock took a hammering at the bourses, the government intervened and scrapped the board and put this new one in.
Satyam is fighting for its life after founder and chairman B. Ramalinga Raju confessed to doctoring the company’s accounts by $1 billion and filling the company’s balance sheets with “fictitious” assets and “nonexistent” cash.
Raju, along with his brother, a former managing director, and the former chief financial officer, have been earlier arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy, forgery, criminal breach of trust and falsifying documents. They face up to life in prison, police said.
