The Resurgence of Satyam
Zafar Anjum
Random House
Edition: Hard Bound
ISBN: 978-8-184-00075-7
Pages: 268
Price: Rs 399
In 2009, all hell broke loose with a simple confession from Ramalinga Raju, founder and chairman of Satyam Computers, the fourth largest IT company in India with over 50,000 employees and business in more than 66 countries. He admitted that the company’s balancesheet carried inflated cash and bank balances of Rs 5,040 crore and non-existent interest income of Rs 376 crore as on September, 30, 2008. Raju also admitted that there was an understated liability of Rs 1,230 crore on account of money that he himself had arranged.
It was a nightmare not only for Satyamites but the entire nation. It was the biggest corporate fraud India had known so far. One difference between this fraud and others was that the Satyam scandal was disclosed by its founder while other scams were busted.
The author of The Resurgence of Satyam Zafar Anjum raises key questions. Why would an iconic entrepreneur like Ramalinga Raju do something like this, and then admit his crime? What forced him into confessing at that particular time or was it to hide something even bigger? Despite close contacts with top corporate honchos in Satyam, Anjum has no answer.
Heavily drawing on the vast existing literature by Indian media, blogs as well as a book produced by Business Standard, The Satyam Saga, Anjum tries to reconstruct a narrative.
Scattered references to Satyamites who put up stiff resistance after the scam broke finds a mention in the book. Anjum quotes Mirzan Faizan, a Satyam engineer who had earlier worked in DRDO, as saying: “When one man created Satyam as an organisation of 53,000 people, why can’t 53,000 committed people rebuild one Satyam?” Had Anjum narrated more stories of such courage and defiance, the book would have been a better read.
However, for posterity, Anjum does record how Satyam recovered from the crisis. It narrates how people in Satyam, the government and regulatory bodies reacted to the fraud and took measures to salvage not only the company but also India Inc’s image. But it would have been more realistic if author had engaged people at the bottom of the ladder.
In the epilogue, Ramalinga Raju is mentioned as being a shrewd man who knew by confessing to a crime he would escape harsher punishment. Raju leads a normal life in Hyderabad after spending two years and eight months in jail. Charges had not been filed against the co-accused.
As much as everyone, the author too wonders about the persona of Raju and seeks answers in management guru, Tom Peters. “Successful performers, for good and sometimes for ill, know how to play a role. They don a persona – a mask of leadership that command others to follow,” Peters is quoted from The Little Big Things.
Peters gives three examples: George Washington, Barack Obama and Bernard Madoff – who weaved the mother of all frauds in modern financial history. “I think Raju’s case is similar to that of Madoff’s,” sums up Anjum.
On Madoff, Peters says, “It was a product of a very carefully concocted persona acted out without let-up or slip-up for decades.” It sounds true in Raju’s case too.
However, The Resurgence of Satyam brings out the communication strategy devised by its team to keep afloat and rise from the ashes and how the team was engaged in segregating and classifying news in the media as truth, half truth and rumours.
The other important issue is that one would have expected Anjum to question how the Mahindras went on to acquire a stake in a company that was opaque and fraught with fraud, listed on Nasdaq and was facing class-action suits in the US?
The Tech Mahindra takeover of Satyam has no doubt come as a big relief for the fraid-hit company’s staff, especially in the light of the fact that the government acted swiftly without a bail package. But many questions on corporate governance issues and the failure to file charges against several Satyam accused remain unanswered. Given his proximity to the Indian IT industry and as a prize-winning fiction writer, Anjum should have told either a new and hard hitting story or narrated a much publicised story with greater felicity. We will have to wait for another book on the Satyam saga.
KS Narayanan
