NEW DELHI: For a man who ran India's fourth biggest software exporter, Mr Ramalinga Raju was not a showy person.
His bungalow in Hyderabad city's upscale Banjara Hills is an understated two-storey structure, with parking for no more than three or four cars.
Friends who have dealt with the 54-year-old chairman of Satyam Computer Services, say it is difficult to know what he is thinking behind a calm exterior. He goes for morning walks, but seldom appears at the swinging parties of Hyderabad's elite.
Behind his back, they sometimes refer to him as 'the man with the Mona Lisa smile'.
Mr Raju, a native of Andhra Pradesh state in southern India, had a comfortable head start: He studied abroad, obtaining a business management degree from Ohio State University.
On his return, he began his career with forays into construction.
Success was uneven and more than once he was strapped for cash.
On one such occasion, he approached a local pharmaceutical tycoon for a bailout, in turn pledging some prime real estate on the outskirts of Hyderabad.
When he could not pay, the pharma boss kept the land, building a research facility there and profiting hugely as land prices boomed.
Satyam, which ironically means 'truth' in Sanskrit, was set up in 1987 with 20 employees as Raju spotted the opportunity in outsourced code-writing.
Within no time, business was booming. Andhra Pradesh, of which Hyderabad is the capital, has one of the largest pools of skilled manpower in India.
Satyam would prove a doughty competitor to its rivals, pricing its services so aggressively that some thought it was prepared to go with minimum profits in order to gain customers.
And it expanded aggressively overseas. When he opened his Sydney office a few years ago, he occupied premises vacated by a top global IT firm. In China, provincial leaders vied to invite Satyam to set up operations in their areas.
But once Mr Raju sold shares to the Indian public in 1992 and later, went for a New York listing in 2001, pressure grew on him to improve the company's performance.
Ever competitive, he was also in a rush to catch the market leaders, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Technologies and Wipro.
'Raju was obsessed with getting past the billion-dollar sales mark. When he got there, he wanted to post US$2 billion,' said an associate.
Satyam posted US$2.1 billion (S$3.1 billion) sales in the year to March 31, 2008.
With the ever-rising pressure to perform, Satyam began doctoring the books to show bigger profits, a process that began several years back, by Mr Raju's own admission.
The value of the land bank available with Maytas, the real estate company owned by Mr Satyam's sons, is what he thought he could use to shore up Satyam's books when things began to go sour.
Maytas, which is Satyam spelt in reverse, has won the contract to build the metro rail in Hyderabad and is believed to have a sizeable land bank in the state.
For all his wrongdoings, Mr Raju has a deep philanthropic streak.
Until a few weeks ago, he was on the board of Naandi, a non-governmental organisation based in Hyderabad which does stellar work in providing clean drinking water in rural areas and supplying mid-day meals to more than a million schoolchildren across India. He also runs the Byrraju Foundation, named after his father, and an emergency ambulance service that has won global acclaim.
But now his empire is in shambles and he faces a possible jail term.
Behind his enigmatic smile, Mr Raju was clearly a driven man. In his resignation letter, he also gave a glimpse of a person whose ambition soon morphed into desperation.
'Every attempt made to eliminate the gap failed,' he said of futile attempts to paper over Satyam's faltering performance. 'It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten.'
This article was first published in The Straits Times on January 08, 2009.
