| Friday , April 10 , 2015 |
Satyam Seven Sundaram- Brokers seek longer jail | |
| G.S. Radhakrishna | |
 The 31-odd months Ramalinga had already spent in jail after confessing to a Rs 7,000-crore accounting fraud on January 7, 2009, will be deducted from the time he serves, the CBI court said. This means the former Satyam boss, whose varying jail terms under various penal code sections will run concurrently, will have to serve a little more than four years in jail. B. Rama Raju was Satyam managing director. Eight others, including B. Suryanarayana Raju (a third brother), former Satyam chief financial officer Vadlamani Srinivas and former PricewaterhouseCoopers auditors Subramani Gopalakrishnan and Srinivas T. too have been sentenced to seven-year terms and fined varying amounts up to Rs 25 lakh. Ramalinga, 60, out on bail since November 2011, stared fixedly at the ground as he was led to the prison van from the courtroom where, a lawyer said, he had looked close to tears after the sentencing. Lawyers said Ramalinga, who ran what was once India's fourth largest software services firm and rubbed shoulders with then US President Bill Clinton, had handed the court a letter between his morning conviction and afternoon sentencing. It pleaded for a short sentence citing the time already spent in prison, his aged parents and his wife and sons, his health problems and his record of social service - helping a management school and launching a research institute with a free emergency service and a health advice helpline. Opinion among lawyers and on the Hyderabad stock exchange was that the sentence wasn't too harsh considering the damage he had done to shareholders and stockbrokers and the number of offences he had been convicted of. Some among his former employees at Satyam (now merged into Tech Mahindra), however, expressed sympathy for a man they once revered. As soon as television channels flashed the court news, many of the senior women Satyam ex-employees broke down at the company complex. Officials of Tech Mahindra, which acquired Satyam in April 2009, refused comment. On the Hyderabad bourse, stockbroker Radheshyam Jain said: "He (Ramalinga) deserved a longer sentence as he had bluffed about profits and diverted Satyam's funds for his sons' enterprises in Maytas." Ramalinga had stunned the country six years ago by revealing that he had padded profits and cooked up bank balances at Satyam for years, keeping his employees and board in the dark. As matters spun out of control, Ramalinga said, he had tried to plug the hole in his balancesheet by persuading his board to rubber-stamp the acquisition of two companies his family owned, Maytas Infrastructure and Maytas Properties. When a shareholder revolt scuttled the move - they thought Ramalinga was looking to bail out the debt-ridden Maytas entities instead of it being the other way round -he realised his game was up. He was in jail for various periods till November 2011 when the Supreme Court granted him bail. Ramalinga had returned to his Jubilee Hills home, where his wife Nandini and family members had been observing religious rituals this past one week, praying for a lenient sentence. The CBI had based its case on a complaint lodged by Leena Mangat, a Secunderabad resident. She said she had invested her retirement benefits on Satyam shares on the strength of the company's presentations of its performance, and lost heavily as the shares slumped after Ramalinga's confession.  http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150410/jsp/frontpage/story_13801.jsp#.VSffttyUeSo |