CBI gets 8-day custody of Satyam scam accused

Almost two months after the arrest of the former Satyam Computer Services Limited chairman, B. Ramalinga Raju, and the other accused in the company’s fraud, a court here on Monday granted to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) their custody for eight days against the seven days sought by the agency. The CBI will pick them up for interrogation from the Chanchalguda Central Jail at 10 a.m. on Tuesday and produce them in court at 4 p.m. on March 17. Besides Ramalinga Raju, his brother Rama Raju, the former Chief Financial Officer of the company Srinivas Vadlamani and Price Waterhouse auditors S. Gopalakrishnan and Talluri Srinivas would be in the custody of CBI. In a six-page order, N. Victor Immanuel, Fourteenth Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, who is also the presiding officer of the designated CBI court, justified the judgment even as he admitted that granting police custody of the accused a fortnight after their arrest went against settled law. But, he preferred to give the custody even after the initial 15 days of arrest in view of the very serious nature of fraud in which more than Rs.7,0000000000 of public money was involved. The magistrate also considered that police remand of accused more than once was “generally disfavoured by law” even if some more offences, however, serious came to light at a later stage. Further, the remand of the accused could only be in judicial custody as supported by several court judgments in the past. ‘Circumstances different’ However, the facts and circumstances in Satyam fraud were different from those set out in judgments cited by defence counsel. The Crime Investigation Department of the and hra Pradesh police, which earlier investigated the case, took into custody Ramalinga Raju, Rama Raju and Srinivas Vadlamani from January 18 to 23 and Gopalakrishnan and Talluri Srinivas from January 31 to February 2. Mr. Immanuel described the fraud as the rarest of rare cases which merited categorising it as an “exceptional case.” The purpose of transferring the investigation to the CBI would be defeated if the agency was not allowed to interrogate the accused. Their physical presence was very much necessary to decode their personal computers, now in the possession of investigators, as the terminals were suspected to be extensively used in the scandal. The settled legal practices should not come in the way of granting their custody. Related stories