Sebi team questions Rajus for 2nd day

A seven-member team from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) today interrogated Satyam Computer Services founder B Ramalinga Raju and the company's former managing director B Rama Raju at the Chanchalguda jail here.

The Sebi team led by its southern zone general manager A Sunil Kumar has been given three days to meet the accused, who are in the Hyderabad central jail. It had questioned only Ramalinga Raju on Wednesday. It is expected to question Satyam's former chief financial officer V Srinivas on Friday.

Sources said that Ramalinga Raju was questioned in the office of the jail superintendent, while his brother Rama Raju was questioned separately in the administrative block.

Sebi is learnt to have questioned the Raju brothers on fudging of accounts, insider trading of the IT firm's stocks, diversion of Satyam funds to other companies promoted by his family and other issues.

Raju's counsel S Bharath Kumar, who had been stationed himself near the jail premises for major part of the day, said that he was not allowed to be present during the interrogation even today. "We will question the validity of statements extracted in a confinement," he said reiterating that the Raju brothers have no legal assistance as they are in a prison.

Meanwhile, the Andhra Pradesh Crime Investigation Department, which is probing the Satyam fraud case, is taking the assistance of National Informatics Centre to decipher the data from the computers seized from the company.

In a related development, the Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) today filed a petition in the sixth additional chief metropolitan magistrate court, seeking permission to question the Raju brothers and former CFO of the company, V Srinivas.

The petition has been posted for hearing on February 9. The Price Waterhouse auditors S Gopalakrishnan and Talluri Srinivas, who were in police custody for two days, were produced in the court today. Their judicial custody ends on Friday.