The government on Friday said it cannot do anything about the class action suit being faced by the auditor Price Waterhouse in the US in the Satyam [ Get Quote ] accounting fraud case.

"American jurisdiction will decide independently of what we do here. We cannot be on any help to them (PW) in the US. We cannot go and say (to PW) don't worry we will pay for you," Corporate Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid told reporters.

"If the US jurisdiction decides (that) they have to pay... they have to pay. That's their problem," he said, when asked whether representatives of PW were asking the government to intervene in the class action suits against them in the US.

The Minister, however, admitted that PW partners have been meeting him and expressing concern about the pending legal action against the auditing firm in the US.

On PW's plea that the auditing firm should not be penalised for the acts of the firm's partners in the Saytam case, Khurshid said, "That stand they should take there (in the US) and not here".

American law firm Pomerantz Haudek Block Grossman & Gross LLP in February had filed a class action suit against the auditors, promoters and management of Satyam in the US District Court, Southern District of New York.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of purchasers of the American Depository Receipts of Satyam between January 6, 2004 through January 6, 2009.

"In addition to allegations of fraud against Satyam and the officer defendants, the complaint alleges that PwC was aware of, or recklessly disregarded, a multi-year massive fraud by Satyam management to overstate the Company's earnings and concocting 1 billion dollar of cash that didn't exist," the law firm had said in a statement then.

Price Waterhouse, the Indian unit of the global audit major, has been maintaining that it followed all the standard accounting principles while auditing the books of Satyam Computer.

However, it also said that its auditing of Satyam could be construed invalid if the statements made by Raju in his admission letter on January 7 about the fraud were correct.

Raju had said that the financials of the company were incorrect for past several years, thus inflating the profit and cash position and understating the liabilities.

Two partners of PW have been arrested in India [ Images ] in connection with their audits of Satyam.

Disclosure of the stunning fraud at Satyam materially impacted the price of the company's ADRs. Trading in the company's ADRs was briefly halted after the fraud was revealed, and the ADRs are now currently trading just below two dollars, a precipitous drop from the company's 52-week high of 29.84 dollar, the law firm said.