Madoff, Meet Satyam: India Now Has Its Own Huge Financial Scandal
By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor
As if the global economic outlook wasn’t bleak enough already, India now has its own financial scandal to add to the bad news.
Ramalingan Raju, Satyam founder and chairman (Reuters)
What’s known as the Satyam scandal — after information technology outsourcing firm Satyam Computer Services — became big news on Jan. 7, when chairman Ramalingam Raju resigned, admitting the company had inflated its profits over several years and falsified accounts and assets.
The company’s shares plummeted 80 percent and sent markets “on a tailspin,” wrote Reuters’ Sumeet Chatterjee, who called the case “India’s biggest corporate scandal in memory.” The Satyam case has become India’s own equivalent of the revelations about Bernard Madoff’s alleged swindle in the U.S.