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Clearing up the Satyam Mess

Posted by: Steve Hamm on April 13

India has chaotic politics and its central and state governments are too-often ineffective, but the government, police, and business community certainly came together and got the job done when it came to fixing the Satyam mess. The news out of India today is that Tech Mahindra has made the winning bid, of $1.2 billion, for the troubled IT outsourcing company, which before its fall in January had been the fifth-largest Indian software services firm. Satyam had been on verge of unraveling ever since its chairman and founder, Ramalinga Raju, admitted to cooking the company’s books over a number of years. The Indian government took control of the company with a few days of Raju’s admission and installed a group of respected industry leaders, including former NASSCOM president Kiran Karnik, to a new board of directors. India’s version of the FBI investigated and quickly made arrests. The collapse of Satyam could have been a calamity for the reputation of the entire Indian tech industry. That didn’t happen. While it raised questions and doubts, the quick and effective response to the crisis by India’s leaders presented an image of a country ready, willing, and able to put its house in order. In the end, the Satyam affair has turned into a reputation builder for India.

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Reader Comments

Ananth

April 14, 2009 03:04 AM

This is a great example on part of the exceptional leadership shown by those who salvaged the company out of the mess, in particular the new board of directors of Satyam and the government which insalled this team.
Mahindras have excellent track record in industry leadership and we expect the acquistion to merge soon smoothly and well into Tech Manindra.

Lastly we need great leadership towards fixing some of the problems in the system in order to prevent recurrence of such collusion and unethical governance practices. That is when we can talk about the lessons learnt.

vijay

April 14, 2009 03:06 AM

I agree with your observation. Let us not forget that Indian PM is an economist and his brief on such times would have really helped. Anyway, the collapse was averted and we are glad the way this reassured the corporate governance quality in India.

Nilesh

April 14, 2009 12:04 PM

India is a developing country but it still has functioning democracy, independent institutions including judiciary and most importantly basic sense of free and fair market. Happy to hear about Satyam being taken over by Tech Mahindra. As long as corporate greed is there, Satyam & Enrorn will always be there. But the good news is they get found out eventually.

M

April 15, 2009 05:34 AM

The speed, efficiency and transparency with which the deal went through should be reassuring to the global tech community. And it should hopefully become a case study for corporate governance though one hopes that we may not need another such instance of intervention.
- Mohan

Nowitzki

April 21, 2009 07:30 AM

The deal had put and end to all the speculations and bought some relief to satyam employees ..Now the Indian govt has to take the culprits to task and see to it that they dont get to see the morning sun out the jail for the rest of their miserable life.

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