The irony lies in the name—Satyam, meaning truth. The real truth is that Ramalinga Raju, the politically connected promoter-chairman of Hyderabad-headquartered Satyam Computers, was lying for years to shareholders, employees and the world at large, building up to India’s largest-ever corporate fraud of over Rs 7,000 crore. The country’s fourth largest IT company—after TCS, Infosys and Wipro—was for several years cooking its books by inflating revenues and profits, thus boosting its cash and bank balances; showing interest income where none existed; understating liability; and overstating debtors position (money due to it). The letter of guilt and resignation from the 54-year-old MBA from Ohio, USA, to the Satyam board and Sebi on Wednesday morning sledge-hammered India Inc, dumbfounded regulators, pummelled the company’s stock, knocked the bottom out of the market, and cast a long shadow over industry in general and the IT sector in particular. It also raised disconcerting questions about corporate governance,the role of auditors (in this case Pricewaterhouse Coopers) and independent directors (Satyam has/had such luminaries such as ISB dean M Rammohan Rao, Harvard’s Krishna Palepu and former cabinet secretary T R Prasad). This wasn’t some fly-bynight operator that had been caught out. Satyam is listed on the NYSE, boasts 185 Fortune 500 companies and the US government among its clients, and employs 53,000 people—that’s equal to the combined number of employees of Tata Steel and Tata Motors (30,000 and 23,000 respectively). Within hours of the Satyam scandal hitting the headlines, its employees had flooded job portals in search of alternate employment. Consider that the Rs 7,136-crore hole in Satyam’s books is way more than the company’s entire salary bill of Rs 5040 crore last year. Worse still, it’s running really low on cash, and once-potential suitors have turned wary—they don’t know what lies beneath. As for Satyam’s shareholders, the stock had gone into freefall before most of them could make a decent exit. By the end of the day, massive selling by FIIs had driven the stock down by almost 78% to below Rs 40 from Tuesday’s close of over Rs 179, wiping out Rs 9,376 crore of investor wealth in the space of a day. Compared to its closing price of Rs 225 on December 15, the stock is down more than 82%. The day after, Raju announced his ill-fated plan to shell out $1.6 billion to acquire his sons’ companies, Maytas Properties and Maytas Infra. It created such a furore that Raju was forced to backtrack. It now transpires that what was seen as a move by Raju to bail out his sons was actually a last-ditch effort to cover his tracks through fictitious cash transfers and wriggle out of an impossible corner . The timing of what is being called ‘India’s Enron moment’ could not have been worse—just when the market was showing signs of responding positively to the Centre’s and RBI’s moves to stimulate the economy. A day after the sensex crossed the 10,000-mark, it plunged by 749 points, wiping out almost Rs 1.3 lakh crore of market capitalization. There’s intense speculation as to what finally triggered Raju’s confession of wrongdoing. It’s clearly more than coincidence that it came hot on the heels of investment banker DSP Merrill Lynch’s letter to the company on Tuesday evening terminating its daysold agreement with Satyam to advise it on strategic options because of “material accounting irregularities’’. But the beginning of the end came when furious investors forced Raju to reverse his Maytas moves. By end Wednesday, the knives were out with Sebi, the exchanges, the Indian Chartered Accountants Institute, the department of company affairs and institutional investors announcing/considering a flurry of probes/action against Raju, Satyam and its auditors. Fearing violence, the Hyderabad police threw a cordon around Satyam’s offices and Raju’s residence in Jubilee Hills as the interim CEO, after expressing “shock”, moved into damage control mode.