Hyderabad, October 20: Nearly 10 months after the former dean of the Indian School of Business (ISB) M Rammohan Rao brought negative attention to the premier business school by presiding over a Satyam board of directors’ meeting that approved a dubious acquisition, ISB is in the news, for the wrong reasons again.
Anil Kumar, one of its executive board members and a director in the global consultancy firm McKinsey & Co, has been named an accused in the Galleon Group insider trading scam being investigated by the US authorities. Kumar was arrested for his alleged role in the insider trading network operated by Sri Lankan billionaire and investor Raj Rajaratnam in the US.
According to sources, the ISB board, which has the who’s who of management education and the global corporate world as its members, is yet to take a decision on Kumar, one of the school’s founding members.
“Kumar has sought leave of absence (from the ISB),” an ISB spokesman told DNA. Though Kumar is believed to have volunteered to quit from the school’s board, there is no confirmation yet.
ISB officials maintain that the involvement of one of their executive board members is “a stray incident and the director was involved in it in his personal capacity”. Interestingly, the school had to go through a similar situation when the role of M Rammohan Rao was questioned in the Satyam scam. Rao chaired the controversial board meeting of Satyam on December 16 allowing the firm to acquire Maytas Infra and Maytas Properties. After the deal fell apart and opened a can of worms for the group, Rao had offered to step down as the ISB dean. He is still associated with the school.
The ISB started offering management programmes since 2001 from Hyderabad.
-Agencies