Satyam Scam
The Satyam scandal was a Rs 7,000-crore corporate scandal in which chairman Ramalinga Raju confessed that the company’s accounts had been falsified. On January 7, 2009, Ramalinga Raju sent off an email to Sebi and stock exchanges, wherein he admitted and confessed to inflating the cash and bank balances of the company. Weeks before the scam began to unravel with his famous statement that he was riding a tiger and did not know how to get off without being eaten. Raju had said in an interview that Satyam, the then fourth-largest IT company, had a cash balance of Rs 4,000 crore and could leverage it further to raise another Rs 15,000-20,000 crore.
Ramalinga Raju was convicted with 10 other members on 9 April 2015. The 10 people found guilty in the case are: B Ramalinga Raju; his brother and Satyam’s former managing director B Rama Raju; former chief financial officer Vadlamani Srinivas; former PwC auditors Subramani Gopalakrishnan and T Srinivas; Raju’s another brother B Suryanarayana Raju; former employees G Ramakrishna, D Venkatpathi Raju and Ch Srisailam; and Satyam’s former internal chief auditor V S Prabhakar Gupta. Ramalinga Raju and three others given six months jail term by SFIO on 8 December 2014.
Finding PwC guilty in the Satyam scam, India’s capital markets regulator SEBI on 10 January 2018 barred its network entities from issuing audit certificates to any listed company in India for two years. SEBI has also ordered the disgorgement of over Rs 13 crore of wrongful gains from the auditing firm and its two erstwhile partners who worked on the IT company’s accounts.
After the fraud came to the light, the government had ordered an auction for sale of the company in the interest of investors and over 50,000 employees of Satyam Computers. It was acquired by Tech Mahindra, and was then renamed as Mahindra Satyam, and was eventually merged into the parent company. The Satyam saga eventually turned out to be a case of financial misstatements to the tune of approximately Rs 12,320 crore, as per Sebi’s probe then. Citibank froze all its 30 accounts in 2009.
Mr Raju also manipulated the books by non-inclusion of certain receipts and payments, resulting in an overall misstatement to the tune of Rs 12,318 crore, shows an analysis of findings of Sebi’s probe. As many as 7,561 fake bills which were even detected in the company’s internal audit reports and were furnished by one single executive. Merely through these fake invoices, the company’s revenue got over-stated by Rs 4,783 crore over a period of 5-6 years. The probe itself continued for almost six years and found that fictitious invoices were created to show fake debtors on the Satyam books to the tune of up to Rs 500 crore.
Enron Scandal
The story of Enron Corporation depicts a company that reached dramatic heights only to face a dizzying fall. The fated company's collapse affected thousands of employees and shook Wall Street to its core. At Enron's peak, its shares were worth $90.75; just prior to declaring bankruptcy on Dec. 2, 2001, they were trading at $0.26. To this day, many wonder how such a powerful business, at the time one of the largest companies in the United States, disintegrated almost overnight. Also difficult to fathom is how its leadership managed to fool regulators for so long with fake holdings and off-the-books accounting.
Enron was formed in 1985 following a merger between Houston Natural Gas Company and Omaha-based InterNorth Incorporated. Following the merger, Kenneth Lay, who had been the chief executive officer of Houston Natural Gas, became Enron's CEO and chairman. Lay quickly rebranded Enron into an energy trader and supplier. Deregulation of the energy markets allowed companies to place bets on future prices, and Enron was poised to take advantage. In 1990, Lay created the Enron Finance Corporation and appointed Jeffrey Skilling, whose work as a McKinsey & Company consultant had impressed Lay, to head the new corporation. Skilling was then one of the youngest partners at McKinsey.
Skilling joined Enron at an auspicious time. The era's minimal regulatory environment allowed Enron to flourish. At the end of the 1990s, the dot-com bubble was in full swing, and the Nasdaq hit 5,000.
Revolutionary internet stocks were being valued at preposterous levels and, consequently, most investors and regulators simply accepted spiking share prices as the new normal.
One of the many unwitting players in the Enron scandal was Blockbuster, the former juggernaut video rental chain. In July 2000, Enron Broadband Services and Blockbuster entered a partnership to enter the burgeoning VOD market. The VOD market was a sensible pick, but Enron started logging expected earnings based on the expected growth of the VOD market, which vastly inflated the numbers.
By mid-2000, EOL was executing nearly $350 billion in trades. When the dot-com bubble began to burst, Enron decided to build high-speed broadband telecom networks. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on this project, but the company ended up realizing almost no return.
When the recession hit in 2000, Enron had significant exposure to the most volatile parts of the market. As a result, many trusting investors and creditors found themselves on the losing end of a vanishing market cap.
By the fall of 2000, Enron was starting to crumble under its own weight. CEO Jeffrey Skilling hid the financial losses of the trading business and other operations of the company using mark-to-market accounting. This technique measures the value of a security based on its current market value instead of its book value. This can work well when trading securities, but it can be disastrous for actual businesses.
In Enron's case, the company would build an asset, such as a power plant, and immediately claim the projected profit on its books, even though the company had not made one dime from the asset. If the revenue from the power plant was less than the projected amount, instead of taking the loss, the company would then transfer the asset to an off-the-books corporation where the loss would go unreported. This type of accounting enabled Enron to write off unprofitable activities without hurting its bottom line.
The mark-to-market practice led to schemes that were designed to hide the losses and make the company appear more profitable than it really was. To cope with the mounting liabilities, Andrew Fastow, a rising star who was promoted to chief financial officer in 1998, developed a deliberate plan to show that the company was in sound financial shape despite the fact that many of its subsidiaries were losing money.
Fastow and others at Enron orchestrated a scheme to use off-balance-sheet special purpose vehicles (SPVs), also known as special purposes entities (SPEs), to hide its mountains of debt and toxic assets from investors and creditors. The primary aim of these SPVs was to hide accounting realities rather than operating results.
The standard Enron-to-SPV transaction would be the following: Enron would transfer some of its rapidly rising stock to the SPV in exchange for cash or a note. The SPV would subsequently use the stock to hedge an asset listed on Enron's balance sheet. In turn, Enron would guarantee the SPV's value to reduce apparent counterparty risk.
By the summer of 2001, Enron was in freefall. CEO Kenneth Lay had retired in February, turning over the position to Jeffrey Skilling. In August 2001, Skilling resigned as CEO citing personal reasons. Around the same time, analysts began to downgrade their rating for Enron's stock, and the stock descended to a 52-week low of $39.95. By Oct. 16, the company reported its first quarterly loss and closed its "Raptor" SPV. This action caught the attention of the SEC.
A few days later, Enron changed pension plan administrators, essentially forbidding employees from selling their shares for at least 30 days. Shortly after, the SEC announced it was investigating Enron and the SPVs created by Fastow. Fastow was fired from the company that day. Also, the company restated earnings going back to 1997. Enron had losses of $591 million and had $690 million in debt by the end of 2000. The final blow was dealt when Dynegy (NYSE: DYN), a company that had previously announced it would merge with Enron, backed out of the deal on Nov. 28. By Dec. 2, 2001, Enron had filed for bankruptcy.
At the time, Enron's collapse was the biggest corporate bankruptcy to ever hit the financial world (since then, the failures of WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, and Washington Mutual have surpassed it). The Enron scandal drew attention to accounting and corporate fraud as its shareholders lost $74 billion in the four years leading up to its bankruptcy, and its employees lost billions in pension benefits.
Increased regulation and oversight have been enacted to help prevent corporate scandals of Enron's magnitude. However, some companies are still reeling from the damage caused by Enron. Most recently, in March 2017, a judge granted a Toronto-based investment firm the right to sue former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG, and Bank of America's Merrill Lynch unit over losses incurred by purchasing Enron shares.
Bernie Madoff Scam
Bernard Lawrence "Bernie" Madoff is an American financier who executed the largest Ponzi scheme in history, defrauding thousands of investors out of tens of billions of dollars over the course of at least 17 years, and possibly longer. He was also a pioneer in electronic trading and chairman of the Nasdaq in the early 1990s.
Despite claiming to generate large, steady returns through an investing strategy called split-strike conversion, which is an actual trading strategy, Madoff simply deposited client funds into a single bank account that he used to pay existing clients who wanted to cash out. He funded redemptions by attracting new investors and their capital, but was unable to maintain the fraud when the market turned sharply lower in late 2008. He confessed to his sons—who worked at his firm but, he claims, were not aware of the scheme—on Dec. 10, 2008. They turned him in to the authorities the next day. The fund's last statements indicated it had $64.8 billion in client assets.
In 2009, at age 71, Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 federal felony counts, including securities fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, perjury, and money laundering. The Ponzi scheme became a potent symbol of the culture of greed and dishonesty that, to critics, pervaded Wall Street in the run-up to the financial crisis. Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $170 billion in assets, but no other prominent Wall Street figures faced legal ramifications in the wake of the crisis.
It is not certain exactly when Madoff's Ponzi scheme began. He testified in court that it started in 1991, but his account manager, Frank DiPascali, who had been working at the firm since 1975, said the fraud had been occurring "for as long as I remember."
Even less clear is why Madoff carried out the scheme at all. "I had more than enough money to support any of my lifestyle and my family's lifestyle. I didn't need to do this for that," he told Fishman, adding, "I don't know why." The legitimate wings of the business were extremely lucrative, and Madoff could have earned the Wall Street elites' respect solely as a market maker and electronic trading pioneer.
Madoff repeatedly suggested to Fishman that he was not entirely to blame for the fraud. "I just allowed myself to be talked into something and that's my fault," he said, without making it clear who talked him into it. "I thought I could extricate myself after a period of time. I thought it would be a very short period of time, but I just couldn't."
The so-called Big Four— Carl Shapiro, Jeffry Picower, Stanley Chais, and Norm Levy—have attracted attention for their long and profitable involvement with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. Madoff's relationships with these men go back to the 1960s and 1970s, and his scheme netted them hundreds of millions of dollars each.
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