Hyderabad, Dec. 27: Satyam Computer Services dramatically called off its crucial board meeting on Monday where directors were expected to consider a share buyback proposal and cobble a strategy to restore the reputation of the software giant after the Maytas fiasco.

The sudden development late on Saturday night marked another low in the company’s crumbling corporate governance standards.

Satyam’s reputation has been wrecked after an extraordinary chain of events that began on December 16 when the company said it had received board approval to acquire Maytas Infrastructure and Maytas Properties for $1.6 billion (Rs 7753.6 crore). The deal was called off the very next day amid a shareholder revolt and battering of the Satyam stock.

The two companies belonged to Satyam chairman B. Ramalinga Raju and his sons and were believed to have been in dire need of cash to retire a pile of debt.

The Satyam board is now expected to meet in the second week of next month but no date has been set. Sources said it could he held on January 19.

The 10-day notice for Monday’s board meeting was thought to be enough to allow the directors — many of whom are based in the US — to converge in Hyderabad.

However, there have been reports of strong dissension among the directors over the way the Rajus tried to project the notion that the board decision on the Maytas buyout had been unanimous.

On Thursday, Mangalam Srinivasan — the longest-serving independent director on the Satyam board — tendered her resignation after owning moral responsibility for failing to cast a dissenting vote after expressing strong reservations about the Maytas deal. She has been on the Satyam board since June 1991.

Pressure has already started to mount on the other independent directors — International School of Business dean M. Rammohan Rao and US-based venture capitalist Vinod Dham — to step down as well. Others like management guru and Harvard professor Krishna G. Palepu have been acutely embarrassed by the episode and worried about how it could ruin their reputation.

Some directors have reportedly asked the management to release portions from the minutes of the earlier board meeting which would show that many of them had raised questions about the Maytas deal.

Rajya Sabha member Abani Roy has already written to the Prime Minister demanding Rammohan Rao’s resignation from several government panels. Rao is a member of the appointment and selection committees for the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and chairmen of the Securities and Exchange Board of India and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.

Raju — who holds just 8.6 per cent of the Satyam stock — had riled shareholders after he said he did not need to seek their approval for the acquisition that would signal the software maker’s foray into the unrelated area of construction and real estate.

The equity pie is diced up into very small slice with 197 mutual funds and 461 foreign institutional investors together holding just over 52 per cent of the stock as on September 30. Aberdeen Asset Managers is the largest institutional shareholder with about 5 per cent.