Reliance probed for alleged misreporting of revenue
Reliance,
which is controlled by the billionaire Anil Ambani and is
The
allegations stem from leaked details from a report prepared by Parakh and Co,
the auditor, for the Indian Government. The auditor was ordered by
Parakh and Co said in the leaked document: "Our report reveals that there has been under-reporting of revenue for the purpose of payment of revenue share, and underpayment of licence fee and spectrum fees."
The claims
threaten to stoke concerns over corporate governance in
In January, the corporate world was left reeling when B.Ramalinga Raju, the founder and chairman of Satyam, one of the largest Indian outsourcers, admitted orchestrating a £1 billion fraud over the course of several years.
The
confession by the disgraced IT mogul that much of the cash he had reported
being on Satyam's books was utterly "fictitious" sent the company's
shares into freefall in Mumbai and New York and raised serious questions over
standards of business regulation in India.
Reliance Communications has denied any "irregularity or discrepancy" in its accounts. It described the auditor's comments as biased and "instigated by corporate rivals".
Parakh and Co’s audit claims that the company reported wireless revenue to the stock market of 152 billion rupees for the year ended March 2008 but reported gross wireless revenue of 129 billion rupees to the Government.
The auditor said that one-off transactions partly explained the difference between the figures. Sources close to Reliance said that the auditors had not discovered anything that the company had not already made public and that it had reported revenues correctly.
|