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Business News/ Companies / News/  Satyam case: special court to pronounce verdict on 23 December
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Satyam case: special court to pronounce verdict on 23 December

After hearing the arguments, special judge Chakravarthi said, according to the lawyers, that he would deliver his judgement on 23 Dec in all likelihood

A special court trying the fraud at erstwhile Satyam Computer Services said it would pronounce its verdict in the case on 23 December, even as lawyers of prime accused including founder-chairman B. Ramalinga Raju made a last-ditch attempt to defend them. Photo: Bhrarath Sai/MintPremium
A special court trying the fraud at erstwhile Satyam Computer Services said it would pronounce its verdict in the case on 23 December, even as lawyers of prime accused including founder-chairman B. Ramalinga Raju made a last-ditch attempt to defend them. Photo: Bhrarath Sai/Mint

Hyderabad: A special court trying the fraud at erstwhile Satyam Computer Services Ltd on Thursday said it would pronounce its verdict in the nearly six-year-old case on 23 December, even as lawyers of prime accused including founder-chairman B. Ramalinga Raju made a last-ditch attempt to defend them.

Lawyers of Raju and the other accused argued before judge B.V.L.N. Chakravarthi that electronic evidence submitted by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) did not comply with Section 65B of the Evidence Act.

Section 65B details the procedure under which electronic evidence should be offered in a court. It requires the person responsible for the computer on which the electronic record was created or stored to issue a certificate establishing the authenticity of any electronic evidence.

The defence on Thursday contended that CBI did not mark electronic evidence in the format laid out by Section 65B.

“Documents exhibited in electronic form become inadmissible and should be excluded from consideration," Ramakrishna Raju, one of the lawyers in Ramalinga Raju’s defence team, said.

The defence has relied on a Supreme Court judgement delivered on 18 September in which a three-judge bench ruled that electronic evidence not documented properly was inadmissible in court. Overruling another SC judgement, the bench had held that electronic records submitted as evidence should comply with the Evidence Act. The ruling meant that electronic evidence such as phone call records, electronic mails (emails) and bank statements submitted as hard copies to a court should be verified as authentic.

“Lot of crucial documents have not been marked in accordance with Section 65B of the Evidence Act... There are a lot of lacunae," said Koka Srinivas Kumar, a lawyer representing the eighth accused D. Venkatapathi Raju.

The defence estimates about 950 documents to have not been marked according to provisions of the Evidence Act. Most of these relate to statement of accounts retrieved from different computers, lawyers said. A total of 216 witnesses and 3,038 documents were examined during the hearing of the case.

CBI lawyers, however, denied the defence charge.

“There are no documents according to us which have no certification," CBI special public prosecutor K. Surender said. “In its true spirit (of the Act) we have provided certification of all documents. Now the court will decide," Surender said.

Mediapersons were not allowed inside the court. All lawyers spoke after the proceedings.

After hearing the arguments of the prosecution and the defence, special judge Chakravarthi said, according to the lawyers, that he would deliver his judgement on 23 December in all likelihood.

“Case is posted for judgement on December 23. In all probability, it will be delivered on that date failing which, because of the volume of the case, it might take a few more days," Surender said.

The verdict will decide the fate of prime accused Ramalinga Raju and his brothers, B. Rama Raju (then managing director of Satyam) and B. Suryanarayana Raju, along with some former executives—former chief financial officer Srinivas Vadlamani, former chief internal auditor V.S. Prabhakar Gupta, G. Ramakrishna, D. Venkatapathi Raju and Ch. Srisailam.

Two former employees of external auditor Price Waterhouse, T. Srinivas and Subramani Gopalakrishnan, are also facing trial. Price Waterhouse is one of PricewaterhouseCooper’s (PwC’s) audit arms in India.

Once the poster boy of the Indian outsourcing industry, Ramalinga Raju confessed to fudging Satyam’s accounts to the tune of 7,136 crore over several years in January 2009—a statement he disowned during the trial.

The investigating agency has accused Ramalinga Raju of inflating revenues, fabricating invoices, falsifying accounts and income tax returns, and faking fixed deposit receipts in collaboration with some of his key executives, to paint a rosy picture of the company’s financials to deceive the public. The CBI estimated in its chargesheet that the scandal caused a loss of 14,000 crore to Satyam shareholders.

Four former Satyam executives—Ramalinga Raju, Rama Raju, Srinivas and Gupta—have also been barred from the capital markets by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) for 14 years, and have been ordered to cough up 1,848.93 crore with 12% interest from 2009 (totalling about 2,958.29 crore) for pocketing “wrongful gains" in share transactions. The Rajus have challenged the Sebi order.

Besides CBI, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has also filed a chargesheet against 213 people including Raju and 166 firms including Satyam Computer under different provisions of Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), and seized properties belonging to them.

Satyam Computer has been absorbed by its new owner Tech Mahindra Ltd, which purchased the scandal-ridden firm in 2009 in a government-overseen auction.

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Published: 30 Oct 2014, 03:55 PM IST
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