The judgment in the criminal aspect of the Satyam Computer accounting scandal, which was to be delivered by a special court here on Tuesday, has been postponed to March 9.
The court was to give the verdict in three cases filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation since April 2009. The former company chairman, B. Ramalinga Raju, and nine other accused in the cases, including his two brothers, were present in the court hall when proceedings began in uneasy silence at 10.30 a.m.
The judge B.V.L. Chakravarthy announced deferring the judgment after consulting the prosecution and the defence as it required writing hundreds of pages. He also said there would be no further postponements after March 9.
The CBI had produced 226 witnesses and voluminous documents to the court as part of prosecution. The court had marked 3,187 documents as objects of evidence.
The court was constituted in 2010 exclusively deal with the Satyam cases though they were tried by a regular Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate prior to that. When the scam broke out following the confessional statement by Ramalinga Raju on January 7, 2009, the investigation was handled by the Crime Investigation Department of the State government which effected the initial arrest of the accused. The case was transferred to the CBI in a couple of months. The agency constituted a multi-disciplinary investigation team with financial and other experts and filed three charge sheets. It also sent letters rogatory to six countries seeking information on company transactions.
A few days ago, an economic offences court had sentenced Ramalinga Raju, his brother and managing director Rama Raju and chief financial officer Srinivas Vadlamani to six months imprisonment in seven cases filed by the Serious Fraud Investigation Office of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs under the Companies Act. However, the verdict was suspended for a month to enable the accused to appeal in a higher court.
