Court orders CBI to club all three Satyam cases

In a significant development, the special court hearing the Satyam Computer Services scam case on Wednesday passed an order that all the three chargesheets filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) against former Satyam chairman Ramalinga Raju and several other accused be clubbed together before further proceedings can take place.

In his order, magistrate B V L N Chakravarti said that as there is enough evidence to show that all the offences form part of the same transaction, they can be tried jointly.

The CBI argued that though they have no objection to chargesheets one and three - which relate to the main case - being clubbed, charges filed under the second chargesheet should be tried separately as it relates to violation of various income tax rules.

The CBI, which is investigating the scam, has filed three chargesheets in the case so far. All the three are being treated as separate cases at present. Of this, two chargesheets pertain to the main scam involving around Rs14,000 crore and the third is about income tax irregularities causing a loss of Rs126 crore to the company. The CBI is all set to file a fourth on Foreign Exchange Maintenance Act violations.

Quoting 223 (d) of the Criminal Procedure Code which says that persons who have committed different offences of the same transaction can be tried together, the magistrate found fault with the CBI, saying that the investigating agency was trying to force the accused to disclose their defence in one case to cover its own lapses in the other cases.

This development is being viewed as a setback to the CBI because it may be at a loss to move further with the trial unless the restatement of Mahindra Satyam accounts is done. "The restatement will not be done before 30 September this year and till then the I-T irregularities cannot be conclusively proved," the Times of India quoted a source as saying. However, the report quoted CBI deputy inspector-general V V Lakshminarayana as saying that the judgment will not be a hindrance for them.
 
"We have got nothing to do with the restatement of accounts to be done by Mahindra Satyam and we can go ahead with our job," he said.

Moreover, the magistrate would deliver his judgment on 25 June on whether or not to examine Raju via video conferencing between NIMS Hospital and the court.