Wednesday November 25, 1:17 AM
Indian authorities file new charges in Satyam scam
Indian federal investigators on Tuesday filed new charges against the founder of scandal-hit outsourcing giant Satyam in the nation's biggest case of corporate fraud, an official said.
The company's founder and former chairman B. Ramalinga Raju stunned India's financial world in January when he declared he had overstated profits for years and inflated the company's balance sheet by over one billion dollars.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Tuesday filed additional charges against Raju and ten others based on "evidence against the accused on several new allegations," CBI spokesperson Harsh Bhal told AFP.
The chargesheet "accuses an internal auditor of willful suppression of auditing irregularities and conspiracy," and new evidence purportedly reveals how the accused created bogus customers and generated false invoices worth 86 million dollars to inflate revenues, said Bhal.
Investigations into the Satyam scandal began in February and the CBI filed the first charges against Raju and eight others in April.
He is currently in custody, along with his brother, who was Satyam's former managing director, as well as the ex-chief financial officer and various auditors.
Satyam was ranked as India's fourth-largest outsourcer by revenues when the scandal broke and its clients included some of the world's biggest companies such as Nestle, General Electric and General Motors.
Satyam Computer Services, based in the southern city of Hyderabad, re-branded itself in June as Mahindra Satyam in a bid to recover from the country's worst-ever corporate accounting fraud.
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