SC agrees to hear bail pleas of 4 Satyam fraud accused

The Supreme Court today agreed to hear the bail pleas of four of the accused arrested for their alleged roles in the multi-crore Satyam accounting fraud and issued notice to the CBI.

A bench of justices Dalveer Bhandari and AK Patnaik directed the CBI to file its reply within two weeks on the bail pleas of Satyam's former employees G Ramakrishna, D Venkatpathi Raju and Ch Srisailam and Satyam's former internal chief auditor VS Prabhakar Gupta.

They had approached the apex court against the August 30 order of Andhra Pradesh High Court which had rejected their bail pleas.

The prime accused in the case -- Satyam former chief Ramalinga Raju and his brother and former MD B Rama Raju are still in judicial custody.

Besides Raju, B Rama Raju, and the four Satyam employees, the firm' former Chief Financial Officer Vadlamani Srinivas, and former PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) auditor Subramani Gopalakrishnan are currently lodged in Chanchalguda Central Prison in Hyderabad.

The accused had sought bail on the grounds that the trial in the Satyam scam was not completed within the Supreme Court-stipulated deadline of July 31 and all the prosecution witnesses have been examined.

The apex court had in October last year, while cancelling Raju's bail, stated that the accused could file another bail application only after July 31, 2011, if the trial in the case was not completed in the local court.

Raju, the former chairman and founder of Satyam Computer, had surrendered on November 10 last year before a Hyderabad court adjudicating the nation's biggest corporate fraud, allegedly to the tune of Rs 14,000 crore.

Of the ten accused in the case, B Suryanarayana Raju, who is Raju's brother, and T Srinivas, a former auditor of PWC had been granted bail by different courts earlier.