This comes a few days after Satyam’s former CFO, Vadlamani Srinivas gave a clean chit to the auditors S Gopalakrishnan and Talluri Srinivas of Price Waterhouse. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has charge sheeted Gopalakrishnan and Srinivas along with Satyam founder B Ramalinga Raju and six others accused in the Rs 7,000 crore fraud. Vadlamani had told the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) that the two Price Waterhouse auditors had no role to play in the fraud as they were given forged documents by the company management.
The others charge sheeted are Ramalinga Raju’s brothers B Rama Raju and B Suryanarayana Raju, former Satyam CFO Srinivas Vadlamani, G Ramakrishna (Vice President Finance), senior finance manager D Venkatapathy Raju, and assistant finance manager Srisailam.
The accused have been charge sheeted for offences of criminal conspiracy, cheating, cheating by personation, forgery of valuable security, forgery for the purpose of cheating, using a forged document as genuine, falsification of accounts and for causing disappearance of evidence. CBI has filed a 300 pages charge sheet and cited 433 witnesses and 1532 documents.
CBI had registered the case on February 20, and had formed a Multi Disciplinary Investigative Team to investigate the case. CBI has completed the investigation in a record time of 45 days.
In a statement issued to the press, Price Waterhouse India has expressed “disappointment and surprise” over CBI’s charges against two of its partners who had worked on the audit of Satyam's financial statements.
The audit firm has also said that it has not come across any evidence of criminal wrongdoing on the part of either partner. Both partners continue to vigorously deny any wrongdoing. Though PW has suspended both the partners from the duties since January, it has said that the two Satyam audit partners and PW India were victims of the fraud.
