However, I can't bring myself to agree with this optimistic view. I heard Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy refer to Satyam as 'one bad apple' and said to myself, "How could he possibly know"? I kept thinking of the less-well-known saying - "There's never just one cockroach in a kitchen".

While the talking heads were hyperventilating about the possible dire impact on our IT-BPO industry, the stock prices of Infosys, Wipro, TCS were doing just fine.

Anyhow, it is likely that many promoters do a certain amount of book-cooking. This is proportionately more in small-cap companies and goes down (on a relative basis) as companies grow bigger and come more in the public eye. The mean "cooking-to-reality" ratio would be different in different industries, with different business groups, different parts of the country etc. At least, that's what the cynical market expects. Raju's problem is that he went way off the scale for his size of company and his industry. He was a "far outlier", sitting all by himself at the distant end of the long tail of this curve of corruption.

Are there are other cases like Raju that still haven't shown up? My guess is that there are. Basically, the Raju story boils down to pilfering huge sums of money to finance real-estate speculation that didn't work out. I know his version is that the money was never there but come on, you don't really believe that, do you? Could there be other cases that conform to this pattern? I'm inclined to say, "How could there not be?"