Australia asks Satyam to pay back money

The ghost of Ramalinga Raju's shady dealings is back to haunt the Mahindras, the new owners of Satyam, yet again. This time in Australia's Victoria state where the state government is asking Mahindras to cough up, what it now claims is millions of Australian dollars they had paid last year to Satyam to set up an A$75 million IT hub in the Deakin University campus at Geelong.

The demand for a refund from the Mahindras comes on the back of Mahindra Satyam's decision to log out of the ambitious project that Raju had promised would create 2000 jobs in the port city of Geelong. After Raju inked the deal in April 2008, the Victorian state government headed by Premier John Brumby had, as sweeteners, handed over 10 hectares of land and an undisclosed sum of money to Raju.

Latest reports in Australian media quoted Victoria's IT minister John Lenders as saying that the payoff to Satyam was in millions of dollars. They also quoted Mahindra Satyam's corporate affairs president Sujit Bakshi saying that the IT company is committed to return the money within a month. Even as top Mahindra Satyam officials in Hyderabad confirmed the news, they played down the amount as being very negligible.

According to latest reports in The Geelong Advertiser and The Australian, Bakshi had in a letter to Lenders, said, "The need to concentrate on an extensive internal restructuring programme of our business precludes Mahindra Satyam from embarking on expansion projects of this kind. While Mahindra Satyam is disappointed that it cannot proceed with the centre, it reaffirms its commitment to future expansion in Victoria when circumstances allow."

Satyam's Deakin project has already resulted in a major embarrassment for the Brumby regime with government facing charges of having squandered away tax-payers money behind a scamster ever since the Satyam scam broke out in January 2009.

As news of Mahindra Satyam's pullout broke, Victorias opposition spokesperson Kim Wells termed the collapse of the project as devastating and said, "We want an explanation of what has happened to the money, how much money has been handed over, we want to know the status of the 10 hectares of land and we want to know what the Brumby government is going to do to replace these 2,000 promised jobs, especially for the young people in Geelong whose hopes have been dashed."