Corporate Australia's push to export IT jobs to India in disarray after Satyam fraud

Melbourne, Jan 9 (ANI): Corporate Australia's push to export IT jobs to India is in disarray following a 1.84 billion dollars fraud involving one of the world's key outsourcing companies.

Telstra, Qantas, Coles, NAB and Suncorp are among scores of Australian companies affected by the scandal, the Herald Sun reports.

Apart from its Australian clients, Satyam provides outsourcing services for the giant Citigroup and Japan's Nissan Motor Corp among other big corporates.

Telstra employs Satyam as one of its four major IT contractors. Spokesman Martin Barr said the telco was actively reviewing the arrangement and planned to cut the number of contractors to two.

NAB has outsourced at least 500 positions to India after engaging Satyam and other providers over the past three years.

NAB spokeswoman Kerrina Lawrence said the bank was monitoring events and was reviewing the arrangement with Satyam.

A team of Satyam IT consultants from India was deployed last year to work on a technology project at Medibank Private's headquarters in Melbourne.

Medibank spokesman James Connors told said yesterday that there were contingency plans in place if the Satyam staff needed to be flown back to India.

Wesfarmers subsidiary Coles also has Satyam staff working at its Melbourne head office.

The fraud, involving Hyderabad-based Satyam Computer Services, also throws into doubt plans for a 75 million dollars software laboratory at Deakin University's Geelong campus.

The laboratory, a joint venture between Satyam, Deakin and the State Government, was slated to create 2000 jobs and inject an annual 175 million dollars into the Victorian economy within the next decade.

Satyam Australia, which employs about 1700 local staff, has headquarters in Melbourne, but calls yesterday were answered by a recorded message.

Shares in the Mumbai and New York-listed business crashed after company chairman B Ramalinga Raju confessed to falsifying the earnings and assets of India's fourth-largest software and outsourcing services provider.

Raju's criminal activities surfaced when shareholders blocked his bid to sell two companies to Satyam in order to plug a 50.4 billion rupees hole in the company's balance sheet. (ANI)