Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Satyam Chairman Resigns After Falsifying Accounts, Shares Fall (bloomberg.com)
28 points by medianama on Jan 7, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments



Anybody ever worked with Satyam consultants or developers?

I previously had a server with 64G of RAM. Satyam requested a 128G swap file, because 'the server was running our of memory'.

I mentioned that I could certainly create a 128G swap file, however when using swap their app would be 300,000 [1] times slower when accessing memory, which would slow down their app to the point of unusability. I also mentioned they had 14 x 12G Java processes running, which may be unneccessary.

Satyam mentioned that the 12G processes were necessary, as the entire heap was being used. I mentioned that Java, being Java (and having its roots in embedded hardware), will walk it's entire -Xmx heap size over time.

I was employed as a Linux administrator. And here I was explaining Java heap to a bunch of Java developers. In three separate conference calls. With all their managers present, asking questions.

Eventually (after around a month of meetings) they decided that the massive swap file request was no longer needed, and I noticed the heap size of the processes had shrunk to a couple of gig each.

[1] Memory speed vs hard disk seek time


Wow that's really an amazing failure of auditing. It's not like with Enron where management had cooked up some really complex accounting schemes. Satyam was overstating CASH! Didn't the auditors go to the company's bankers and brokers to get independent account statements? Perhaps they were in on it, too.


Right, so the accounts are falsified by the chairman of a company whose name means "truth".

Oh, the irony.


Know what's even more ironic?

"Satyam was the 2008 winner of the coveted Golden Peacock Award for Corporate Governance."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyam_Computer_Services


1. $ 1 billion is missing from Satyam

2. CEO, Ramalinga Raju has admitted that he committed fraud

And yet Satyam interim CEO Ram Mynampati has not filed any police case against either Ramalinga Raju or Satyam Auditors.

Mr Ram Mynampati seems to be a co-conspirator to this fraud.


Here's the letter he wrote to the board and stock exchanges:

http://www.moneycontrol.com/news_html_files/news_attachment/...


Thats quite a big fraud... I hope the chap sees some serious jail-time for this...


Just watched the news on TV. It seem he had shown profits as Rs.649cr while the actual profit was only Rs.61cr!!!

I always wondered why Indian IT companies pay people so low when compared to the rest of the world. May be the above is one of the reasons. These guys do this stuff to over-state their success. Now that one is now in the limelight, some govt law and commerce team should inspect other bizzardly successful organisations.


"I always wondered why Indian IT companies pay people so low when compared to the rest of the world."

Overgeneralization is mostly a bad idea(especially when pointing negative things). When you mean "pay less" does it mean relative to other professions in India? In which case, it is simply wrong, IT professionals are one of the highly paid folks in India. If you are comparing the pay with people in other countries like US, i am not sure if that is the case as well, unless you are talking about salaries in dollar terms - this can be easily explained - a dollar costs around 45 rupees.


"I always wondered why Indian IT companies pay people so low when compared to the rest of the world."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity. Partly.


This situation begs 2 1/2 questions:

1) Should the SEC attempt to regulate/audit/oversee companies whose ADRs trade on American stock exchanges, given that they have become so popular with investors?

  1.5)  If so, how?

2) What prompted Raju to offer even the limited explanation that he gave? Guilt? Corporate responsibility?


To prevent such frauds, I believe all stock exchange listed companies in India must comply with RTI Act (Right To Information Act).

In Bangladesh all listed companies comply with their RTI Act.


One breathlessly awaits the amusing libertarian spin.


What exactly does this have to do with libertarianism?


It's fraud -- a crime, even by libertarian standards (at least mine).




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: