A total loss estimate of Rs 14,162 crore and fixing the responsibility for that on the Raju brothers is the sum total of the final CBI charge sheet?a copy of which is with FE?filed in the Satyam case.
But the 80-page charge sheet is silent on the possible collusion of any entity other than those run and owned by the Raju family in India?s biggest corporate fraud, though the CBI report emphasises that the fraud began more than a decade ago in 1999.
The nub of the charge sheet is Raju and his team members created seven fake customers to create an inflated sale of Rs 430 crore in April 2006. To create a matching trail to cover the fictitious sale, they made the company spend another Rs 68 crore on salary of the employees who were made to work on the non-existent project and pumped the accounts and audit rules and coerced internal audit employees to stay silent on the deals. The report gives a detailed breakdown of the way the then finance heads established the possible complicity of the two auditors from Price Waterhouse in the episode.
In an unrelated transaction, Ramalinga Raju and the other accused borrowed Rs 160 crore from front companies in 2007 to make Satyam buy the shares of Nipuna, a BPO company floated by the Raju family. The transaction cost Satyam Rs 229 crore.
Finally, allegedly from the proceeds of the insider trading in the shares of the company, the family built up real estate of Rs 350 crore between 1999 and 2006.
But what it excludes is interesting. While the charge sheet gives details of the massive Rs 1,951-crore loans the accused raised from several financial companies, the final summary does not mention the sum or the need to follow the money trail. The money was offered against Satyam shares pledged through a shell company. The charge sheet makes it clear the seven non-banking financial companies sanctioned loans worth more than Rs 100 crore each to front companies like Samudra Greenfields, Vamadeva Greenlands and Vyaya Agro on the surety of the pledged shares of Satyam when the IT company was building up huge cash balances.
The charge sheet also draws upon Ramalinga Raju?s statement to trace another set of loans of Rs 1,221 crore raised from HDFC Bank, HSBC, Citibank, Citicorp Finance, BNP Paribas and ICICI Bank between 2000 and 2008. The document notes the banks were paid a consolidated interest of only Rs 43 crore in the eight years. All these loans, it notes were raised on fictitious authorisations created by the accused on behalf of the Satyam board. But it does not explore if any or all of these banks had inquired why a supposedly cash-rich company needed to raise such large loans. This, too, is referred to in passing.