Ramalinga Raju: India's Mr Enron

Ramalinga Raju christened his fledgling IT company 'truth'. As it turned out, he perpetrated India's largest ever corporate fraud, with striking parallels to the Enron scandal.

What gods of misfortune were looking down in 1987 when Ramalinga Raju named his fledgling IT company Satyam? The name means "truth" in Sanskrit. Yet in the wake of India's largest ever corporate fraud, the question we're all asking now, says Time magazine, is "what's Sanskrit for Enron?"

The comparison is compelling, not least because Satyam was as heavily garlanded with good governance and "creative entrepreneur" awards as Enron. Numbering the bluest of blue chips among its clients, it claimed to service one-in-three companies in the Fortune 500. Indeed, Raju was considered such a big-hitter that when Bill Clinton visited Hyderabad in 2000 he was invited to share the president's podium, notes the FT. His personal style, however, was very different from that of Enron's bombastic chief. A thoughtful man, with a penchant for reading Marx and Karl Popper, he lived in a modest Hyderabad bungalow and "was quiet to the point of being dull". Colleagues say it was difficult to know what he was thinking, says The Singapore Straits Times: some called him "the man with the Mona Lisa smile".

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