Satyam Denied Leave to Appeal Over Legal Action by Upaid

The UK's House of Lords has refused India software house Satyam leave to appeal the case between it and UK based mobile payments vendor, Upaid. The only issue now left open in the UK is how much Satyam will have to pay Upaid in legal fees.

"The road now leads to substantive resolution. It must be obvious, even to Satyam's management, that justice is at hand," said Upaid Chairman & CEO Simon Joyce. He praised the UK's "swift and definitive" judicial ruling that assures Satyam will face a jury in Texas, as Upaid had intended from the outset.

"Satyam appears to have been in a state of denial. They lost in the UK high Court and again on appeal and have now lost in the House of Lords. Next they will lose in Texas", Joyce said.

Upaid employed Satyam in 1997 to develop software needed for the commercial deployment of UpaidÃ's payments processing framework. Court admissions in London now show that the Indian company misled Upaid about the existence of internal assignments of IP by SatyamÃ's own employees. SatyamÃ's own witness testimony makes clear at the time Satyam purportedly assigned all ownership rights to Upaid in 1998; it did not in fact own what it was selling to the payments service leader.

A patent infringement court case launched in Texas against third parties in 2005 revealed the use of forged signatures by Satyam employees on critical documents provided to Upaid by Satyam in the course of the software development. At the time the forgeries were exposed Satyam refused to testify in the proceedings to defend against the allegations of forgery.

Upaid spokesperson Joanne Hunter pointed out that Satyam's own filings in the UK admit that "extremely large sums of money are at stake". Though the exact amount of damages is not yet knowable, Upaid is required to file their damage calculation model with the Federal court within weeks.

Posted to the site on 7th August 2008