Asian Window

Joe Leahy from Mumbai in Financial Times:

On the investor page of Satyam Computer Services’ website on Wednesday was a box announcing results for the quarter ended September.

The box, which had not been changed since before the scandal began, kicked off with a bullish introduction from B Ramalinga Raju, the founder and now former chairman of the country’s fourth largest software group.

“I am pleased to announce a better-than-guided performance for the second quarter of fiscal year 2009,” Mr Raju said. “We achieved this in a challenging global macroeconomic environment.”

In fact, by Mr Raju’s own admission on Wednesday, the company achieved this by rigging the accounts from top to bottom – and not just in September but over the past several years. In the process he perpetrated a fraud so large, complex, and brazen that Indian business people are already calling it the country’s “Enron”.

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Also in FT:

Business hero who crashed and burned

Less than a month ago, B Ramalinga Raju, founder of Satyam Computer Services, was a regular fixture at India’s most prestigious corporate events.

The man who on Wednesday admitted to falsifying his company’s books to the tune of more than $1bn, in 2007 won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for building his information technology group into an enterprise employing more than 50,000 people.

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