The Wipro employee, who had allegedly committed fraud to the tune of $4 million (about Rs 18 crore), for which he was “fired”, is believed to have committed suicide in Bangalore soon after the fraud came to light last December, according to the police.
Sources in the Government Railway Police (GRP) said Anoop Kumar Agarwal, a chartered accountant, was found dead on a railway track between K R Puram and Byappanahalli railway station. The railway police came across the body on the morning of December 23 last year. The Cantonment GRP then filed a case of ‘unnatural death’.
Agarwal, according to the FIR filed by the GRP, hailed from Dhanbad in Bihar and was staying with his family in a posh apartment in the Sarjapur Road area in the city, where Wipro’s headquarters is located. His wife, who is also a qualified CA, hails from Muzaffarpur in Bihar.
Wipro had stated that the said employee was fired from his job in December after being found out.
On being asked to comment on the issue today, Wipro stated in an SMS: “We cannot share any information on the employee for reasons of employee confidentiality.”
Reports about an employee committing a fraud at the ‘controllership’ division of Wipro’s finance department had appeared in the media a few days ago, after which speculation on the whereabouts of the said employee was doing the rounds.
Wipro officials maintained that they had managed to recover about half of the embezzled money ($2 million) through “persuasion”. The company had recently told this paper that it had decided not to file a case against the person, “who was from a respectable family”, based on a suggestion made by their internal committee that included external counsels. Wipro had hired investigative and legal agencies in the wake of the embezzlement.
Meanwhile, a PTI report citing unnamed sources in Wipro said the extent of the embezzlement was expected to be far more, possibly to the tune of Rs 32 crore.
I would call the investigation independent only if the CFO, Suresh Senapathy is also subject to the investigation. A company like Wipro, is no different from Satyam from a risk profile standpoint since it is largely a founder-owned company. Since the Chairman owns nearly 80% of the company, it barely operates like a true publicly owned company, and most decisions are taken like its a mom and pop shop. I sometimes wonder if the employee in question was merely a scape-goat, and if Suresh Senapathy himself was shepherding this, and setting aside funds for questionable transactions that cannot be recorded in the books (read as "bribe"). Was this Wipro's way of generating "black money"? I hope there is a class-action suit by the shareholders (atleast in the US) and the CFO is held accountable for this lapse, and made to resign! We don't want scapegoats, but we want to see the senior leadership team held accountable.
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