Shaky future: Satyam employees frustrated, seeking options

Prior to the disclosure of accounting fraud, Satyam's employees, numbering 52,865 (as on September 30, 2008) had rallied behind their employer, vowing to take Satyam to new levels of growth track.

Even when investors clearly indicated that they had lost their faith in the company's board after a botched attempt by Satyam to buy two firms - Maytas Infra and Maytas Properties - in which Satyam's promoters held stakes, for $1.6 billion, became public, the company's employees said despite the poor decision made by Raju and others, the promoters had given their all to make Satyam one of the top four IT outsourcing companies in India.

According to the employees, the promoters should be given "benefit of doubt" and "because of one mistake we cannot just let them go."

Some even claimed that they were "the right people to steer Satyam out of the crisis."

However, the employees had to eat their own words when B. Ramalinga Raju, Satyam's founder-chairman, made a shocking disclosure that the profits from the core business of the company have been inflated "over a period of last several years," and of the reported cash and bank balances of Rs.5361 crore reported for the quarter ended September 30, 2008, Rs.5040 crore was non-existent.

Raju said the company's revenue was Rs.2112 crore, 22 percent less than the inflated figure of Rs.2700 crore that had been reported while the operating margin at Satyam in the September quarter was 3 percent of revenue, instead of the reported 24 percent.

Raju also said the company had Rs.1230 crore worth of understated liability.

The sensational admission, which dragged Satyam's stock to record lows, meant Satyam was a dud company that has probably zero assets, zero cash flows, zero income and zero prospects and when rumors began spreading in the market that Satyam was paying its employees by raising funds and taking loans, the employees realized that their future prospects in the company were bleak.

The future of 53,000-odd employees of beleaguered technology outsourcer Satyam Computer Services or Satyamites as they are popularly known is at stake following the sensational disclosure by the company's founder-chairman last week that he had fudged the company's accounts for several years to inflate profits to the tune of Rs.5040 crore.