Satyam accounting fraud accused granted bail by SC

Four former employees of IT major Satyam Computers Services Ltd and a former auditor of PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), arrested for their alleged roles in multi-crore accounting fraud involving the software firm, were today granted bail by the Supreme Court.

"On the totality of the circumstances, we deem it appropriate to release them on bail on a personal bond of Rs 2 lakh and surety of like amount," a bench of justices Dalveer Bhandari and Dipak Misra said, while granting bail to the five accused.

The former Satyam employees, who were granted bail, were its former Internal Chief Auditor VS Prabhakar Gupta besides executives G Ramakrishna, D Venkatpathi Raju and Ch Srisailam. The fifth accused, who got the bail, is PWC's former auditor Subramani Gopalakrishnan.

The five had approached the apex court challenging the August 30 order of Andhra Pradesh High Court which had rejected their bail pleas.

Of the total ten accused in the case, Satyam's founder B Ramalinga Raju's younger brother B Suryanarayana Raju and former PWC auditor T Srinivas had already been granted bail by different courts earlier.

The prime accused, B Ramalinga Raju and his brother and Satyam's former MD B Rama Raju, have so far not approached the apex court for bail and are still lodged in Hyderabad's Chanchalguda Central Prison under judicial custody.

The tenth accused in the case is Satyam's former Chief Financial Officer Vadlamani Srinivas, who too is in judicial custody. 

The five accused, who were granted bail, had sought it on the grounds that the trial in the Satyam scam was not completed within the Supreme Court-stipulated deadline of July 31 and that all the prosecution witnesses had been examined.

For his alleged role in the accounting fraud, Satyam Computer's founder and its former chairman Ramalinga Raju had been arrested first in January 2009, but his bail was cancelled in October last year by the Supreme Court.

While cancelling his bail, the apex court had stipulated that the accused would file another bail application only after July 31, 2011, if the trial in the case is not completed in the local court.

Following cancellation of his bail on CBI's plea, Raju had surrendered on November 10, last year before a Hyderabad court adjudicating the nation's biggest corporate fraud, allegedly to the tune of Rs 14,000 crore.