Raju ban gaya not-so-gentleman?

Satyam Computer Services founder Ramalinga Raju in a still from the documentary series ‘Bad Boy Billionaires’

What's power, if not, those you can't express so openly against? And this applies to both groups and individuals.

As for hard political power, as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin once famously promised: There's freedom of speech. Unsure, if freedom after speech!

The recent, crackerjack Netflix documentary, Cover-Up, on the life and times of America's top investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, feels instructive then.

While Hersh could ‘pelo' the powerful Pentagon over My Lai massacre during Vietnam War, or rub Nixon's nose to the ground as US President, veritably in the land of the free - it's when he switched over to report on corporate America that it was "the beginning of the end" for him at the New York Times (NYT).

The usual collusion of big media and mega corporations, apart - wherein the advertiser becomes, by default, the medium's owner - consider the corporate fraud that Hersh was investigating with a conglomerate "hiding money/profits" between unrelated entities.

It was about favourable loans issued to top executives. That's exactly what had gone on inside the NYT itself!

That said, take the case of the IT giant Satyam's founder, Ramalinga Raju, with interests in unrelated entities under another company, Maytas (Satyam spelt backwards).

Supriya Sobti Gupta, the producer of the show

He'd fudged accounts to shoot up Satyam stocks.

Eventually pushed against the wall, Raju publicly confessed to this fraud. Would he have, if Satyam wasn't listed at the New York Stock Exchange in the US? My sense is, no.

Supriya Sobti Gupta, who's produced the four-part, Netflix doc series, Bad Boy Billionaires (BBB), kinda agrees with me. BBB, if you recall - detailing rise and fall of India's alleged robber barons, Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, Subrata Roy - dropped, October, 2020.

Only, the last episode, on Satyam/Raju (Riding the Tiger), disappeared, after promos.

Raju had participated in the series. But sensing the title ‘Bad Boy Billionaire' hinted at harming his image, he obtained a court injunction, arguing that it could also influence his ongoing legal case.

Raju's served 33 months in prison. He's out on bail.

After over five years of litigation, a Hyderabad court lifted the supposed ban. That 50-minute episode is finally out on Netflix. What does it reveal about the infamous Satyam scandal?

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in a still from the documentary ‘Cover-Up'

My favourite bit's where Deepak Parekh, then chairman of HDFC, talks about how Raju had forged his bank statement, with one digit in the account number missing, and the logo on the left side of the page, instead of right, to show healthy cash reserves.

Except, he didn't hold an HDFC account!

Parekh was personally involved in the damage-control post the Satyam scandal, upon insistence of the government.

It's incredible how, in about six months of the US financial meltdown of September, 2008 - that placed Satyam's books under scrutiny - the company had been sold off to Tech Mahindra, April, 2009!

Until then, Raju was the father of India's tech-outsourcing industry. Which boomed in 1999, as journalist Raghu Karnad puts it in BBB, when that "gorgeous absurdity" called the Y2K problem, to do with computer systems, turned out to be a "damp squib". Several Indian IT firms benefited.

Satyam remained the perennial number four - after TCS, Infosys, Wipro - with the "number five/three problem." As in, you never wanna slip under. But what if you "cooked books" to move one up, or stay on, at least?

Once Satyam's stocks got wiped out, people lost thousands of crores, overnight. But that's the risk in the offer document that investors take.

Which, marginally, separates Raju from Mallya (from India's South), Modi (West), Roy (East), featured in BBB.

The former two allegedly blew away depositors' money from government-owned banks. The latter's wealth reportedly came from shady chit-fund schemes in villages/small towns.

Also, unlike the other three, Raju belongs to the tribe of old-world Indian business, who'd rather be anonymous, and rich - than famous, hence, more vulnerable.

His fall, you notice, attracted less/zero schadenfreude from lay public. Maybe a podcast could still somewhat restore his image!

I asked producer Supriya what it was like to meet Raju at his family village-home - the interview that didn't subsequently make it to the documentary. She called him, "enigma". That's what emerges from BBB too.

She said, "Those who don't know him since Satyam think he's probably in jail. Those who do, regard him still as the man who built Hyderabad, bringing tech jobs into the city in tens of thousands."

Raju also owns a lotta land. He's financially fine. Surely, he doesn't deem himself a scamster - only as someone who did business as it's done; sometimes. Money floats mysteriously at the top.

Fine financial journalist Sucheta Dalal says in BBB that Satyam's numbers would repeatedly fail the "smell test". Yet, nobody - board, auditors, press - could detect the stench, over quarters/years.

Supriya, who's also directed Caught Out (2023), on Indian cricket match-fixing, used to be a BBC, Al Jazeera journalist. I ask her, if it's easier to get interviewees onboard a Netflix doc, since it survives news-cycles. She feels, yes. And, therefore, minutest inspection.

While BBB is essentially an entertaining explainer rather than an exposé, Netflix has probably spent more on litigation than actually producing it.

Only greater viewership can justify such persistence/expenses. Hardly any Seymour Hershes around. Hence, this note.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.