Were some of Satyam’s clients dummy companies?

By M H Ahssan

On paper Satyam Computer Services has 690 customers, of which 185 are Fortune 500 companies. While there can be no doubt about the number of the Fortune 500 companies that are its clients, investigators are still not sure whether all the other customers actually exist. This in view of the discovery that the customer list of Satyam during Raju times was a top secret that even senior company executives had no access to.

Investigators aver that many of the clients could be dummy companies that could have been used for hawala transactions to channelise money back into India. Export income being tax free, such channelising could have made economic sense, the investigators think. The apprehension of investigators has been raised by their near certain belief that money has illegally been funnelled into India by the Rajus.

“The same gang of Srinivas Vadlamani and his vice president of accounts Ramakrishna G had access to the consolidated list of clients and the revenues generated from each of them. Nobody else knew nothing much,” a senior manager of Satyam told TOI. “A high-level of secrecy was maintained and we felt that this was too much. But then we thought the company did not want to lose clients to competitors,” the senior manager added.

From time to time, independent checks about clients used to be done by the company. But this was limited to clients who were listed on various stock exchanges and whose balance sheets were available publicly. As far as private limited companies are concerned, the checks would probably be limited to what appeared on their web sites.” But these details could have been fictitious,” an analyst said. Further, the executives doing the check had no access to the revenues generated from these client companies.

What has made the job of investigators difficult is that these clients are spread across 65 countries in various geographies. Satyam’s clients are spread across the six continents: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. So they cannot travel to so many countries, make a physical check of the premises of the company and estimate whether the revenues claimed to have been generated from there was true.

It is quite possible that the Satyam manager or director in charge of a particular geography was also not aware of these customers. Investigators say that they would have known about genuine clients and the revenues generated from them. But they would have no way of knowing what other fictitious companies were being mentioned as clients and revenues attributed to them, the investigators say.

HNN’s inquiries reveal that Satyam maintained a list of over 3000 companies that had been clients of the company in the last three years. “The list includes top companies, but also there could have been a small client who had given one off work. All such companies are mentioned in this list,” highly placed sources said.