Satyam has excess staff, says CBI

Satyam has employees far in excess of its requirements, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is investigating the scam, has said in its chargesheet. The Hyderabad-based software company has 53,000 employees on its payrolls at the end of the quarter ending September 2008.

In a charge that corroborates what disgraced founder and then-chairman B Ramalinga Raju had said in his confessionary letter on January 7, the CBI has said that the high number of associates created a burden on the company, putting its margins under pressure.

The investigating agency further said that the high bench strength, with several employees not having enough work, shows that Satyam was being run poorly. “As a result of the underutilisation of the associates, the company is forced to pay salaries without jobs on hand, which increased the burden on the finances of the company,” it said.

The CBI also accused Raju of falsifying utilisation rates for over two years. In its chargesheet, the CBI said that
Raju, along with younger brother Rama Raju and the company chief financial officer Srinivas Vadlamani, was responsible for reporting a falsified utilisation rate of 74.88 per cent for offshore employees from the second quarter of FY07 till the second quarter of FY09, while the actual figure was 62.02 per cent.

The investigating agency also said that that the company’s bench strength for offshore associates was as high as 40 per cent against the reported 25 per cent.