Ramshckles in PwC

With the Satyam fiasco seening no end in sight, PwC saw some turbulence in its India Offices with Dinesh Kanbar announcing that he is leaving PwC in search of external opportunities. This is evidently a fallout of the global tax, consulting, and accounting firm taking a firmer grasp of its Indian member firm operations after two of its auditors who were found to be guilty of colluding with the now-imprisoned Satyam chairman and CEO Ramalingam Raju of inflating the financial statements and book of audits. So far, spokesperson from the PwC India have maintained a neutral stance stating that migration and turnover are natural and will pose no serious implications to their business activities. However, It should be noted that PwC got a lot of bad press after the Satyam fallout. Some of the prominent clients of PwC India include UB Group, Reliance, and Tata.

Sources privy to these development say that the appointment of Singapore based Gautam Banerjee triggered this exodus. Gautam who was heading the Singapore operations of the firm was given the responsibility of leading the India operations. Dinesh, who was heading the tax, practice of the PwC India was the prime contender for this coveted post, sources say. These top level changes were effected without asking for election or taking the India-based diretors into confidence.

Today, the BSE sensex and NIFTy both touched their peak in the last 15 months (or may be 18 months). While NIFTY reached a high of 5230, Sensex zoomed to 17400, raising the expectations for the investors and traders that 2010 will see more upswings. Banks, automobiles, and IT so far have been the trendsetters, while pharmaceuticals turning out to be a dark horse and has given surprisingly lucrative returns. Speaking of IT, the large caps seems to have touched their peaks and I personally do not see anything spectacular returns from them, so my bets will be on mid-cap IT including Hexaware, Rolta, Sonata, Nucleus, and perhaps FSL, Firstsource, Foursoft, and Moser Baer.

Sugar stocks are also showing some upward momentum and today Bajaj Hindustan and Balrampur Chini rose by 1-2% each. It will be interesting to see how they perform with trade pundits and marketers predicting a sugar shortage of anywhere from 7-10 million tons on account of rainfall deficit and delay in sugarcane crushing in UP sugar mills.