Hyderabad, July 22: The CBI, inquiring into the multi-crore scandal in Satyam Computer, says that the company’s scam-ridden former chairman B. Ramalinga Raju and his family were also guilty of skimming Rs 2,743 crore through tax returns and double bookkeeping.

J.L. Negi, a former RBI general manager now on deputation with the CBI, has informed a recent workshop conducted by the agency in Mumbai that senior officials and internal auditors of Satyam were guilty of recording fake sales and making manual entries in the account books.

“We followed the cues in the books and found that fake invoices were also generated by the operators in such large numbers that it was difficult to sift the originals from the fakes,” he said.

Between 2003 and 2008, the CBI found that Satyam operators had created 7,561 bogus invoices. Ramalinga Raju and some of his accomplices had created companies in the names of Mobitel, Cell net, E-care, Sinoni, North-C, Auto-Tech, and Hargreaves with fake addresses.

Negi said data from the card swiping machines at some key Satyam offices showed that certain groups of officials engaged in such “tasks for the management”. They came once in three or four months and also worked late at night to create all the fake documentation.

The CBI had enrolled a team of 25 officers and 40 investigators to crack the Satyam case. The agency found that the promoters’ share in the firm had fallen from 18.78 per cent in 1991 to barely 2.18 per cent by December 2008. Through benami operations with brokers, they had converted their equity stakes into cash worth Rs 767.73 crore.