Daylife/AP Photo by Mahesh Kumar A
The chairman of India’s fourth-largest software-services provider has resigned after confessing to inflating the company’s profits for years with “fictitious” assets and non-existent cash…
Satyam employs 53,000 people, operates in 65 countries and serves almost 700 companies, including 185 Fortune 500 companies. More than half of its revenue comes from the United States.
Satyam Chairman B. Ramalinga Raju said the balance-sheet padding began several years ago to close “a marginal gap” between actual operating profit and one reflected in the company’s accounting books. It continued through the years, he said.
“It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten,” Raju said in a letter to the company’s board of directors.
I love that last sentence. Probably closer to the truth – and understanding of what Raju was trying to do – than anything we’ll ever hear from the ranks of Madoff, et al.
Update: Satyam has been delisted from India’s stock exchange
Eideard 
I’d love to know who has audited those books for so many years and never discovered this. It is extremely hard to believe so !!
Somehow the auditors, representing pretty well all of the public accounting firms, have managed to avoid any mention at all in the financial meltdown of the entire world and they walked away with their tens of millions of dollars, totally unscathed.
Now that’s pretty cool, if you can pull that off! Mysterious but cool…
Large corporations are already pulling out of India – We tried to set up a datacentre there with practically unlimited resounces and had people peeing in the network closets – unreliable power and things you wouldn’t even believe ..not to mention you train a worker and they leave after 3 months for a 50 cent raise..
@rgshacker – actually, I’ve experienced the same problem in Texas. 🙂
Indians are cheater
If this kind of act/ audit done by indian. it means that Bombay incident is also done by indian intelligence and they blaming pakistan.
Indian seeing the india as a business power. but this act they wont. but now they become fraud Power.
@shahzad – sorry you’re still stuck in that communal bag. If you believe every popular myth about your so-called enemies, I’m afraid life and politics is never going to offer anything better.
As much as I castigate my political enemies, I realize that many of them can be turned to something positive. At the least, commercial competition is healthier and more beneficial than military solutions.
The indian government needs to neutralize the negative image going abroad because it might effect the existing and new investment. Moreover one must appreciate the swift response from the government. Now lets see how other outsourcing destination capitalize from this huge IT scam which has raised eyebrows on conducts of other software companies.
It’s a shame for everybody who were aprt of this IT sector. But incidentally things didn’t have affected badly to the image of Indian IT sector. Every segment of IT industry shown a healthy growth even in the period of downturn.
i dont think he’s not the only one t blame, it’s more an accountant works than his.