Ramalinga Raju sentenced to 7 years in jail, also Rs 5cr fine for committing fraud

A special CBI court on Thursday held Satyam founder and chairman B Ramalinga Raju guilty in the multi-crore accounting fraud, sentencing him to 7 years of rigorous imprisonment. The court also imposed a fine of Rs 5 crore on Raju.

Raju who has already spent over 30 months in jail had urged the court to be lenient with the sentencing, citing health grounds.

The scam surfaced in January, 2009, after Raju, Satyam's then chairman, allegedly confessed to manipulating his company's account books and inflating profits over many years. Around 3,000 documents were marked and 226 witnesses examined during the trial that began nearly six years ago.

Beside Raju, the others found guilty in the case are, his brother and Satyam's former Managing Director B Rama Raju, former Chief Financial Officer Vadlamani Srinivas, former PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) auditors Subramani Gopalakrishnan and T Srinivas, Raju's another brother B Suryanarayana Raju, former employees G Ramakrishna, D Venkatpathi Raju and Ch Srisailam and Satyam's former internal chief auditor VS Prabhakar Gupta.

Raju and others were charged with offences like cheating, criminal conspiracy, forgery and breach of trust under relevant sections of IPC for inflating invoices and incomes, account falsification, faking fixed deposits, besides allegedly falsifying returns through violation of various Income Tax laws.

While the CBI accused Raju and the others of cheating, breach of trust by way of inflating invoices and incomes in the first and third charge sheets, the second one dealt with the accused allegedly falsifying returns through violation of various IT laws.
During the trial, the CBI alleged that the scam caused a loss of Rs 14,000 crore to shareholders of Satyam.

In January last year, Ramalinga Raju's wife Nandini Raju and sons Teja Raju and Rama Raju were among 21 relatives of the ex-Satyam boss who were convicted by a Special Court for Economic Offences here for default in Income Tax payment.