Satyam employees fooled to work on fake projects

Satyam ex-chairman Ramalinga Raju's fraud game did not spare even its employees. While it inflated revenue through fake invoices, the company created teams to work on the fake projects. The employees working on these 'projects' were made to believe there were clients waiting for these products to be delivered. According to the finds of the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI), the employees were also regularly sent emails about the product and project progress as if they were all coming from the clients abroad. But the emails were fake and were used only to keep the employees engaged.

The fraudulent chairman along with the finance in-charges and the core team created at least seven projects, showing that clients were waiting for these products to be delivered. There was regular exchange of mails from the management to the employees to give an impression of the keen interest of management in execution of these projects. The investigation also found the invoices do not match with the ledgers of banks with which Satyam had transacted in the U.S. The ledgers maintained by Satyam were dishonestly and fraudulently forged pertaining to these seven customers to incorporate the collections pertaining to all the 63 invoices.

What has caught the investigators by surprise is the way the emails to employees for monitoring the progress of the fake projects were generated. The CBI found that they were all generated from Hyderabad. Detailed analysis of the emails revealed that the Internet protocol addresses from which the emails were sent at the relevant time and date were all from within Hyderabad itself, which clearly shows that such emails have never emanated from these seven foreign customers. Further, it was also established that these emails were relayed by the Rediffmail server which has got a paid service facility called Domain Services, which facilitates its clients to create email IDs at their own domain names.

In this case, it was found that the payments for the said services were made through Bank of Baroda Visa credit card which belongs to D Venkatapathy Raju (one of the accused). These email IDs were freely used by the core team working on fabricating the accounts to give sanctity to the fake projects. For the purpose of executing the projects, which were never delivered to the customers, the accused have wasted thousands of man hours of the associates of Satyam there by incurring a wasteful expenditure to the tune of Rs65.88 crore towards the salaries of the associates and other overheads.