SFIO to visit Satyam office to enquire into fund siphoning

A Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) team will visit Hyderabad soon to enquire into the siphoning of funds by promoters of the IT company Satyam. The SFIO team, sources said, will be meeting officials of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) which is also probing the Satyam fraud.

"The visit is with the view to have a better coordination with the CBI working there. Discussions would be held regarding the various aspects of the fraud at Satyam, especially, to gather insight into the findings of the CBI in the money-siphoning case," an official source told a news agency.

The SFIO, the investigative arm of the Corporate Affairs Ministry, has been asked by the government to probe the angle of siphoning of money by the promoters of Satyam and submit its report by October. The investigation would require the SFIO to check the accounts of over 350 companies and 700 to 800 bank accounts.

Besides visiting the headquarters of the IT company, which has been taken over by Tech Mahindra, the SFIO team would meet representatives of some local companies which had dealings with Satyam.

In April, the SFIO had submitted a preliminary report on the Satyam fraud to the government. The report, spread over 14,000-page, however, has not been able to track down the chain of events leading to diversions of funds, sources said.

The report also did not give any indication about the beneficiaries of third-party transactions totalling about Rs 600 crore. Similarly, the end use of funds raised through American Depositories Receipts worth USD 100 million have not been tracked.

Talking to reporters in Hyderabad last week, Corporate Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid said, "there are still some aspects to be reported on and the final report will now come." The Minister dismissed media reports that the government was not satisfied with the preliminary report submitted by the SFIO. "There s no question of not being satisfied with the report," he had said.

The SFIO in its preliminary report showed violations of various provisions of the Indian Penal Code like criminal breach of trust, forgery and cheating.