Are Satyam employees set to join BoA?

About 250-300 employees at fraud-hit Satyam Computer Services are joining Bank of America, a newspaper said on Wednesday.

The employees were working on a Satyam project for Merrill Lynch, which was taken over by the US bank after it was hit by the subprime crisis last year, it said.

The project was not renewed by Merrill after Satyam was caught in country's biggest corporate scandal and the work of managing its database and providing infrastructure support would now be done in-house, the paper said.

The first of these employees will join Bank of America between April 2 and 8, it said, adding they have been given salary increases of around 10 per cent and joining bonuses.

A spokeswoman for Satyam said, "The report is speculative." An official at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch in India said she could not immediately comment.

Satyam, whose market value has slid to $505.6 million from $7 billion last May, is in the midst of a bidding process to find a new buyer. It plunged into a crisis in January after its founder quit as chairman revealing profits had been falsified for years.

Engineering conglomerate Larsen & Toubro and mid-sized outsourcer Tech Mahindra are among the suitors, and local media have said US private equity WL Ross & Co was also among the bidders.

Agencies