Price Waterhouse Auditors Arrested in Satyam Inquiry

From Bloomberg:

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP’s Indian affiliate, the auditor of Satyam Computer Services Ltd., said two partners were arrested by police as authorities extended the nation’s largest fraud inquiry.
Srinivas Talluri and S. Gopalakrishnan were remanded to judicial custody on charges of “conspiracy and co- participation,” A. Shivanarayana, a police spokesman in Andhra Pradesh state, said from the province’s capital Hyderabad, where Satyam is based. Price Waterhouse said in an e-mailed statement it didn’t know why two partners were detained.

Seven years after the implosion of Enron Corp. led to the dissolution of accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP, the Satyam case has put PricewaterhouseCoopers in the spotlight. Indian police, fraud squad, markets regulator and accounting body have started investigations after Satyam founder Ramalinga Raju said Jan. 7 that he had fabricated $1 billion of assets.
“Over the last fortnight, the firm has fully cooperated in all inquiries and has provided the documents called for by the Indian authorities,” Price Waterhouse said today in a statement from New Delhi. “We greatly regret that two Price Waterhouse partners have been detained today for further questioning.”

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP may also face scrutiny in the U.S. after Satyam’s New York-listed equities lost 82 percent of their market value in two weeks. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether Satyam misled investors and officials from the SEC plan to coordinate inquiries with counterparts in India.

The auditing firm said Jan. 15 that its reports could no longer be relied on after former chairman Raju said he’d fudged the accounts. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, a statutory body which oversees auditors, will report on its investigation into Price Waterhouse on Feb. 11.
Prosecutors allege Satyam padded employee numbers to siphon off cash and forged documents to support fake bank deposits.
Satyam had about 33 billion rupees ($674 million) of “fictitious and non-existent” accounts, public prosecutor K. Ajay Kumar told a hearing on Jan. 22. The company had about 40,000 employees, compared with the 53,000 claimed by Satyam, he said.