Satyam brass have been selling stock

Top executives sell 1.6 lakh shares in the last 2 months.

HYDERABAD: Even while assuring its employees and stakeholders that all’s well at Satyam Computer Services despite the US economy slowing down and the various hurdles Indian IT companies are facing, senior management executives of the NYSE-listed IT firm are on a stock-selling spree.

About half a dozen top executives of the company have offloaded over 1.5 lakh shares in the last few days.

Interestingly, Satyam’s chief financial officer Srinivas Vadlamani, too, is among those top executives who

Satyam Computer Services Ltd - BSE/NSE values after this News was Published!

have bundled out their shares. Apart from Vadlamani, the sellers include T Hari, the company’s global head of marketing communications, K Sriram (part of consulting team), Manish Mehta (head of SAP practice), Kiran Cavale (head of business intelligence and data warehousing, and Venkat Kumar Raju. The list of sellers also includes Vinod Dham, who is on the board of directors of the company.

Of all these executives, Vadlamani has sold off the largest chunk of shares — about 92,358 followed by Mehta (30,000 shares), Cavale (16,500), T Hari (13,000), Raju (10,000) and K Sriram (2,000). Dham sold 2,500 shares arising out of 1,250 American depository shares. According to market sources, most of these executives sold their shares in the price range of Rs 360 to Rs 420 per share.

Though on an equity base of Rs 134.5 crore, the 1.6 lakh shares sold by the top executives are not very significant, the transaction by the personnel who are part of the leadership team of the company is giving rise to several interpretations and speculations.
“I agree that the timing of the transaction is not right. Otherwise, it is a normal transaction and I had sold shares even last year during the same time to meet my personal commitments,” Vadlamani told DNA Money. According to him, he had sold shares on September 11 and 12, 2008, though the BSE took some time to put it in the public domain.

“We get shares as part of our incentive package. These are not free shares and we pay Rs 200 per share to the company to get them. Even on what we got after selling these shares in the current market condition, we have already paid back about 50% to the company,” he explained.

Another senior executive said the shares were sold as part of the tax planning and advance tax commitments. “In fact, we had sold our shares much before the Lehman development happened. We were not influenced by the developments in the US while selling our shares. This is something we do every year after the shares get free from the lock-in restrictions,” he said.

Meanwhile, the company has given out the much-awaited increments to its employees. Though the details of the packages are yet to be known, employee sources indicate that the management guidance of 12-14% increments was not across-the-board and the average hike is in the higher single digit range. The increments would be paid out in the October salary cycle.

Courtesy:DNA