The veteran technocrats and former president of National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) Kiran Karnik has been appointed as the chairman of the board of Satyam Computer Services on Friday.
His appointment to head the six-member board came a day after the appointment of A S Murthy as the new chief executive officer of the beleaguered company. The restructure of the management was essential after the disclosure of fraud case by company founder B Ramalinga Raju on January 7.
Raju had confessed the crime of manipulating company’s balance sheet many times in the last seven years which led to a Rs. 7,800-crore financial scam in India’s fourth largest IT firm.
Announcing the appointment of Karnik, Corporate Affairs Minister Prem Chand Gupta said that Karnik is a global face for the country’s IT sector and a respected figure from the earliest chosen directors.
Commenting upon the ongoing probe, Gupta said that after focusing probe on only Mayas Infra and Maytas properties, the government had now decided to widen the investigation to 350 more firms including 325 entities and 25 individuals linked to Satyam and the Raju family, including auditor Price Waterhouse and several sister concerns of Satyam like Satyam BPO Ltd, Nipuna Services Ltd, Knowledge Dynamics Pvt Ltd, Nitor Global Solutions Ltd, CA System ASP Pvt Ltd, and Satyam Venture Engineering Services Pvt Ltd.
The Serious Frauds Investigation Office (SFIO) is examining the matter and investigation is going in the right direction, added Gupta.
The auditing firm Price Waterhouse that was involved in the auditing of the fraud-hit firm since last seven years is also in the probe list of SFIO, said minister.
Last month, the government had appointed six members in Satyam’s board of directors: Deepak Parekh, the chairman of the Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC); C Achutan, a former member of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI); Kiran Karnik, former head of NASSCOM; Tarun Das, the chief mentor of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII); T N Manoharan, former president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), and Suryakant Balakrishnan, a nominee of the Life Insurance Corp. of India (LIC).
Before joining Satyam as the chairman, Karnik has already served as the founder-managing director of Discovery Networks in India, founder-director of Indian Space Research Organization’s Development and Educational Communicational Unit, and several other government committees including the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister as a member.
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