Satyam addresses media: liquidity a concern
8 Jan 2009, 1814 hrs IST, ECONOMICTIMES.COM
The decision of the team of seven Satyam executives to come together and address the press may not have been such a good idea given that it
accentuated, if anything, the mess that the company is already in.
Satyam Computer Services is speaking to its top 100 clients individually, but if the team is as unstructured with their comments and disclosures as they were in their interaction with the media, it may not help to hold customers' sentiment.
The interaction started with the interim CEO Ram Myampati clearly saying that the CFO was not present as he was not attending office due to personal reasons. But a few minutes down the line, he confessed that not just the CFO but the company had received the resignation letters of the Managing Director as well as the Chairman.
Myampati was clearly ill prepared as he kept dilly-dallying between his stance that he had not spoken to the top management since Wednesday and his having attended a conference call with all the three on Thursday. He kept mentioning how the sequence of events was not clear in his mind.
The plea taken by the crack team that is spearheading the ill-fortuned company is that all these years the figures they saw was the date that had passed the filter of the auditors and therefore, the disclosures that Ramalinga Raju made took them by as much surprise as they had taken the rest of the stake holders of Satyam.
The Satyam board relied on audited data on revenue and had no inkling about the fraud, said Mynampati.
On the conduct of auditor PriceWaterhouseCoopers, he said: "We have not verified what process PwC took to certify financial statements. We are not yet in touch with them."
"I want to set the record straight, I along with other members of the board relied on audited data to make our recommendations. I am not related to the promoters. We will help investigating authorities," he said at the press meet.
"We first have to establish the veracity of Raju's statements. We have not completed the process," he added.
Another top priority for the company was to protect employees' careers, said Mynampati.
However, he also confessed that while the December salaries of the employees have been taken care of, the company is faced with immediate liquidity problem and is looking at raising liquidity from the market.
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