Satyam board to safeguard employee, client interests: Director
By IANSThursday, January 15, 2009
NEW DELHI - The newly-appointed member of the Satyam board of directors, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) chief mentor Tarun Das, Friday said the main priority was to safeguard the interests of employees, customers and investors of the scam-tainted IT company.
Minister for Corporate Affairs P.C. Gupta Thursday named three more directors to the Satyam Computer Services board. Besides Das, the other two directors named were T.N. Manoharan, noted chartered accountant, and Suryakant Balakrishnan, nominee of the Life Insurance Corp.
Satyam’s disgraced founder B. Ramalinga Raju last week admitted to a Rs.70-billion ($1.43 billion) accounting fraud.
In a statement, Das said he had accepted the government’s request to serve on the government-nominated Satyam board ‘in a spirit of public service, to work in partnership with my fellow members of the board’.
‘Our collective endeavour is to help find solutions to extremely difficult challenges facing the company and the priority is, as other board members have said, to safeguard the interests of employees, customers and investors,’ he added.
On Thursday night, CII also praised the ‘quick action’ of the corporate affairs minister on the Satyam matter.
CII director general Chandrajit Banerjee said that the new board had some of the ‘best corporate minds of the country and between them, collectively, have the necessary experience to turn around Satyam’.
CII said that with the appointment of auditors KPMG and Delloite, it is certain that the authentic record of accounts will be available soon. ‘This would go a long way in the process of reviving Satyam,’ it added.
The government earlier nominated three members to Satyam’s board. They are Deepak Parekh, chairman of Housing Development Finance Corp, Kiran Karnik, former president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies, and C. Achuthan, former member of the Securities and Exchange Board of India.
