Can it be that there are crooks in the computer business? Why, the very idea shocks me down to my seat in Louie’s Casablanca café.
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Jones Day and Latham & Watkins landed leading roles on an Indian government-sponsored auction for outsourcing firm Satyam Computer Services. On Monday, the scandal-plagued company announced the sale of a 51 percent stake in its business to Indian telecommunications company Tech Mahindra in a deal valued at nearly $600 million.
Hyderabad-based Satyam nearly collapsed in early January after founder and former chairman B. Ramalinga Raju admitted to board members that the company’s accounts had been falsified. Last week India’s Central Bureau of Investigation charged nine people — including Raju and two of Satyam’s outside auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers — with forgery and fraud.
By admitting to fraud and forgery, Chairman Raju is implicitly suggesting that other companies may not be engaged in fraud and forgery, that he is the bad apple in the barrel. Just look closer into the barrel. I dare you to find one company with assets exceeding $5 billion that is not rotten to its core.
We call it capitalism.
