Satyam may be able to summarily solve the problems caused by its high-level corporate fraud by transforming itself into a “Labour-Managed Firm”.
One of the new Government-appointed board members has stated publicly today that the company has little or no debt. If this is true it would be interesting because not only were the vast cash-assets non-existent, the liabilities-side of the balance-sheet also may be small, which could mean the company was simply far smaller in terms of value than it had made itself out to be. In a bankrupt firm, the remaining assets normally come to belong to the creditors but what if the main creditors happen to be the work-force? If that is in fact the situation in this case, Satyam may be a prime candidate to be transformed into a “Labour-Managed Firm” of the sort discussed by Jaroslav Vanek (The General Theory of Labour Managed Firms and Market Economies, 1970) and James Meade (The theory of the labour-managed firm and profit-sharing, Economic Journal 1972), and surveyed by e.g. Louis Putterman in the New Palgrave Dictionary and by Martin Ricketts in The Economics of Business Enterprise 2003.
As I had briefly mentioned earlier here, the transition could be made by Satyam’s existing technical and other staff being allowed to participate (with their personal savings and claims to future income) in any auction of the “works-in-progress” that constitute the client contracts the company presently has around the world and which constitute its major intangible asset. This may be the single best way to preserve the firm’s value as well as the income-streams of its staff.
The staff would have to make a transition from being employees to becoming self-managers which may not be easy in practice, although in theory the information-technology industry may be well-suited to labour-managed firms given the peculiarly intangible nature of their products. The marginal cost of production of (true) information is typically very high but the marginal cost of dissemination of information is near- zero.
If this happened and a corrupt bankrupt Satyam-I transformed itself into a viable Labour-Managed Satyam-II, the newly appointed board would become redundant even more quickly than it would have done otherwise — though this board may be even less likely to know of Vanek and Meade than to be familiar with modern corporate finance. Time perhaps to hit the textbooks, gentlemen, and burn that midnight candle! Is that something we can expect from some of the key lobbyists of India’s organized business sector?
Subroto Roy
Postscript 1 : Of course if the asset-side has been fraudulently exaggerated while the liabilities-side has been small, the fraud has been directly perpetrated on equity-holders who held stock that was overvalued by the market as a direct result of the fraud.
Postscript 2: I find (grotesquely) amusing the new found emphasis on “Independent Directors” in view of the obvious fraud in the advertised biographies of some rather notorious Independent Directors in the IT-business and other sectors of corporate India and the higher bureaucracy! There seems in fact to have been a wild hyperinflation of reputations generally, especially in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune and other such hip with-it places — people claiming to have earned PhDs when they have none, people calling themselves “Dr” on the basis of some defunct Soviet management institute having once paid them off, people claiming to be Harvard postgraduates on the basis of some outsourced executive development programme of a few weeks’ duration, people claiming academic publications and academic affiliations which are non-existent, etc etc. All that for another day! (But any former students of mine who may find the above pertinent to themselves may please know their old prof is cross with them! Tsk tsk!) (And then there was the one of the senior government economic planner who told his astrologer on the telephone his correct date of birth but had lied to the Government of India by a couple of years…. clearly he did not want to get his own Ptolomaic horoscope wrong even if his plans for India in the Copernican world went awry!)
Independent Indian: Work & Life of Professor Subroto Roy 