More dirt: Insider trading log found

Government investigators probing financial irregularities in Satyam Computers have stumbled upon stunning details including an “Insider Trading Register” and a specially programmed computer server curiously named “My Home Hub” used to store books of accounts, reports Gaurav Choudhury.

Government investigators probing financial irregularities in Satyam Computers have stumbled upon stunning details including an “Insider Trading Register” and a specially programmed computer server curiously named “My Home Hub” used to store books of accounts.

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The details indicate that Satyam’s now-jailed founder-chairman B. Ramalinga Raju and his accomplices may have meticulously planned the alleged doctoring of accounts for several years.

An 11-member team of inspectors of the Registrar of Companies (RoC) seized reams of documents including an “Insider Trading Register for April 1 to December 31, 2008”, a 19-page “Takeover Register”, and an “Investments Register” besides several volumes of minutes of board meetings, and annual general meetings since 1993.

A report prepared by RoC Hyderabad after a 10-hour search-and-seizure operation, showed the company’s statutory and other financial records for several years were stored at three different locations in the city.

While records such as minutes of meetings were kept at the company’s registered office at May Fair Trade Centre on SP Road in Hyderabad, the books of accounts and other records were maintained at the Satyam Technology Centre’s “Financial Records Godown” at Bahadurpalli. Both the offices are 40 km apart.

Moreover, the books of accounts for the current year (2008-09) were being maintained at computer server called “My Home Hub” at Satyam Computers’ centre in Hyderabad’s Hitech City in Madhapur.

In addition, details of accounts from the beginning of 2002 till January 7, 2009 - the day Raju came out with his dramatic, five-page confession - were stored in a specially created database server under two separate Internet Protocol (IP) addresses (an IP address is the electronic address of a computer on a network used to pass packets of information between computers).

“Vouchers relating to transaction covering several years were kept in the godown,” an official familiar with the investigations told the Hindustan Times on the condition of anonymity.

Investigators are now collating the information and sifting through tomes of data dating back to 1993 to uncover corporate India’s biggest fraud.