Satyam approached by potential buyers: Tarun Das
20 Jan 2009
Government-appointed director on the board of Satyam Computer, Tarun Das, and chief mentor, CII, said the company has been approached by potential buyers.
''It would be unfair of me to say that the board has not yet discussed about a buyer for Satyam. I have to truthfully say that we have been approached by potential buyers,'' Das admitted. When queried further, Das said the potential buyers included both multi-national and Indian IT companies but added none of them were among India's top IT companies.
''The priority is to keep the company going, to retain the customers and to retain the employees,'' Das said. He added that the board was in touch with bankers to help the company out from its current cash-strapped situation and said the bankers have given a positive response. ''We are in touch with the employees to understand their organisation, their business better, we met with some of them and on Saturday and we will meet with more this week,'' he added.
''We have looked at the legal issues of the company because of the class action suits filed in America and we have appointed legal advisors to deal with that. Then there are issues including appointment of CEO etc, which are at the top of the agenda and we have to deal with all issues together. We would be doing that,'' Das said.
The Satyam fiasco made international headlines when its erstwhile chairman B Ramalinga Raju admitted in a confession letter to cooking the company's books by more than Rs 5,000 crore.
Raju was subsequently arrested and in a bid to prevent the company, with over 50,000 employees, from collapse, the government moved swiftly to dissolve the Satyam board and appointed six new directors including well-known names such Deepak Parekh, Kiran Karnik and Tarun Das.
The six-member board has since pulled out all stops to keep the company afloat.
Earlier, there were reports that L&T chairman AM Naik met the company affairs minister PC Gupta as L&T had recently picked up a 4-per cent stake in the beleaguered IT company. Naik said he was taking updates from the government on the situation.