Click to play videoSatyam's new board has its work cut out to keep the company afloat, pay salaries and hold on to clients.
In his first exclusive interview, board appointee Kiran Karnik tells CNN-IBN’s Karan Thapar that the company is hopeful of getting money to pay January salaries by mortgaging its physical assets.
But there's a question mark on all numbers associated with the company- including number of employees - and PriceWaterhouse could be complicit in the scam.
On customers
On the customer front I can tell you with some sense of confidence that we have looked at it, we know many of the customers. Customers are well known, I have a sense of comfort. On all other aspects concerned with financials I would put a question mark behind every figure. I'll put a question mark on the employee number also - there is yet, not a verification done. these processes are underway, but as of today - question marks.
Complicity or incompetence?
It is one of the two very clearly - either there is great incompetence at not being able to find this out or there could be complicity - it could be one or the other, because it just can’t be that something of this scale, size and duration can just pass by through a set of auditors over a long period of time
Is Satyam viable?
We have got a bit of a catch there, because the banks see this as a viable business proposition, but they don’t have the documentation because there is no balance sheet. So we have to find a way of at the moment immediately – as in the next few days – getting enough money without enough documentation, and that’s a huge challenge. Plus point though is that the company has huge fixed assets - land and buildings - and most banks will be happy to lend against that sort of physical touch and feel assets.
Customer’s responses
There is a move and NASSCOM has taken a lead in talking to the industry people, they are all very sensitive and want to help, they say they will not pro-actively poach employees or customers. But at the end of the day I am very pragmatic - I know business is business, you couch it under any name - you say I am not pro-actively going but he is coming to me. There is a real possibility of customers moving to other vendors, or other vendors trying to speak to customers
On employee pay
That’s part of the financial problem that we have – we had one a few days ago when in the US. As you know the salaries are due half-monthly, and we were able to pay the salaries and the medical insurance – we are hopeful that in next few days we will get the money infused that I talked of to pay the Jan salaries
A buyer?
Many people have been talking to many of us - some, mostly informally, so clearly there is interest, I repeat there would definitely be interest because as I said the company has done well, it has a marquee list of customers, it has excellent talent, and there would most certainly be buyers for it.
Formal offers?
At this stage, we have not gone out to look for offers and we will be looking at what we do in that at the next board meeting. We will have some discussions, we have had some informal discussions - there will be more definite discussions as we move ahead.
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