The Securities and Exchange Board of India will send a 9 member team headed by Sunil Kumar its Divisional Chief from Chennai to probe the Satyam scam. The entire effort will be supervised by SEBI’s Executive Director Mr. Nagpal.

SEBI, which had earlier found nothing wrong with the governance practices of Satyam and went to the extraordinary length of giving it a clean chit, has now woken up to the need to examine every aspect of the activities of the Satyam promoters and management. But frankly, when the Satyam Chairman has already confessed to extensive wrong doing, all that SEBI can only check if there is more dirt than disclosed and that is an academic exercise.

At this time, the regulator would be doing more for all the stakeholders if it had called an emergency meeting to check if some value can be salvaged out of Satyam on the strength of its contracts and staff. But here is the irony. While naive Satyam employees are busy giving sound bites to the effect that the company will be taken over, most of corporate India as well as leading regulators seem to think that the government will allow the company to die through sheer neglect. Frankly, this is one of those times when most of us would be happy if we were proved wrong.
For once, we would like the government to surprise us by helping to find a buyer for Satyam in the next three days, instead of putting out press releases to say how many different agencies are probing what is already a clear case of fraud.

Ramalinga Raju’s shocking confession to a fraud of over Rs 7000 crore however answers one question that had puzzled corporate watchers — why d

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