Satyam scam: How greed got to 'nice guy' Raju

Shankar Rao, DSP in the CBI looked relaxed as he made his way to the special court set up to deal with the Satyam accounting fraud case inside the Nampally court complex in Hyderabad. With the judgement due on Thursday, Rao's journey with the case was coming to a closure. At least till the appeal is made in a higher court.

"I was an inspector when the scam first broke. Through these six years, I have been promoted to a DSP," Rao said, alluding to the time the court took to decide whether Ramalinga Raju was indeed a scamster.

2:30pm was the appointed hour. And the judge brushing aside Ramalinga Raju's plea that his age, his philanthropic activities, the 32 months spent behind bars and the fact that he has an aged mother to look after, be taken into consideration before deciding on the quantum of sentence, sent him to jail for seven years. If Raju was disappointed, he did not quite show it. Before he stepped into the court, Raju must have prepared for the worst. And the worst was being sentenced to prison for seven years, the maximum punishment this court could have given.

Ramalinga Raju is now convict number 4148 in the Manasarovar block in the Cherlapally jail. His brother Rama Raju, who used to be his managing director at Satyam Computers, is one number ahead at 4147. Both brothers were also fined five crore rupees plus.

The verdict brings the curtains down on one of the most shameful episodes in modern-day India, as the Satyam fraud was the most high-profile case of white collar crime in post-liberalisation corporate India. In the last six years, Raju had been reduced from a celebrated corporate czar to a persona non grata. India Inc was embarrassed that it had bestowed on him several prestigious awards for corporate governance, including the Golden Peacock Global award for Excellence in Corporate Governance in 2008, just a year before Raju was arrested by the Andhra Pradesh CID.

But while there are many who point to this verdict as apt punishment for betraying trust of millions of shareholders, there are also many who say Raju was not the archetypal fraud, who indulged in a scam to lead a flashy life. Always understated, polite to a fault, Raju was never the kind to wear his riches on his sleeve.

While he was in jail, his wife Nandini Raju published a book of Telugu poems that Raju had written while he was at the helm of affairs at Satyam. Titled Me in Myself (Naalo Nenu), the poems are a mirror to Raju. In one of the poems, he rues, "Life is full of rules and rules, reels and reels of rules". In another, he cautions against ignoring anyone. In a couplet, he narrates how simple it is to make a man. "Boil up oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, iron, sulphur, iodine, copper, zinc and fluorine together with DNA," he wrote.

Raju's former colleague at Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI), Venkat Changavalli is one who remembers only the philanthropic side of the former IT honcho. For him, the phone call on the morning of January 7, 2009, broke his heart. "I am going to make certain confessions which will hurt you and EMRI. I want to apologise to you for that," Raju began. As Changavalli heard him, Raju continued. "I disturbed your career, bringing you from Chennai to Hyderabad. I want to tell you that I am quitting as chairman of Satyam Computers and so is Rama Raju as director. But I want to request you not to quit. You should continue and save this organisation. You do please approach another funder."

Changavalli did not understand the import of what Raju had told him till a couple of hours later, when the confession letter went public. In the letter, Raju admitted to have committed many fraudulent deeds.

Sometime in 2009, Changavalli also got a surprise visitor from Chanchalguda central prison, where Raju was lodged. It was the jailor with his daughter, who told him that Raju spoke about EMRI's 108 ambulance service most of the time inside prison and wanted him to find out from Changavalli how it was doing.

As Raju walked out of court into the police vehicle to be taken away to jail on Thursday evening, it was almost as if he was a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde like personality. Many still see him as a do-gooder who perhaps could not control his own greed.