New Delhi, Jan. 7: A morality play is being performed on a global corporate stage. A few weeks ago, B. Ramalinga Raju, the founder of Satyam Computer Services, was reckoned to be the genius who had made the unlikely transition from small Godavari district landowner to global software czar.

Today, he’s the fallen angel of an industry that has always prided itself on its high ethical standards and moral probity. “He was a demigod. Now the only silver lining is that he is spilling the beans himself,” says one senior software entrepreneur.

But as the industry comes to grips with the magnitude of Satyam’s spectacular plunge from grace, there are still mixed feelings about its founder. “He doesn’t seem to have stashed away the money in a Swiss bank,” says one industry analyst.

Ramalinga Raju has always kept an assiduously low profile, seldom talking to newspapers or TV business channels. Some in the software industry describe him as always calm, “even monk-like”.

Nevertheless, there are those who will insist that they have had reservations about Satyam for years and that the company was never on the same pedestal with other software giants like Infosys, TCS and Wipro.

As a businessman, Ramalinga Raju has always had a dual personality. His father Byrraju Satyanarayana Raju was a small Godavari district landowner who moved to Hyderabad and began buying land in the city.

While others bought in the more fashionable southern part of the city, Satyanarayana Raju began snapping up large tracts in Medchal on the northern outskirts of Hyderabad. Satyanarayana Raju successfully began growing grapes in the region.

Ramalinga Raju studied at Loyola College, Vijayawada, and then did an MBA at Ohio.

Today even after making a fortune in software, there are many who feel that Ramalinga Raju hasn’t forgotten his early lessons in business and that he is still much more comfortable with real estate and property development.

His two companies, Maytas Infrastructure and Maytas Properties, run by his two sons Teja and Rama, have large holdings both in Hyderabad and elsewhere. The family has built software parks in Hyderabad.

But Ramalinga Raju has a knack for attracting controversy. E. Sreedharan, the chief of the Delhi Metro, resigned from his advisory role to the Hyderabad metro project because he differed about the contract awarded to Maytas.

Also, in collaboration with the Andhra Pradesh government, Ramalinga Raju has pushed ahead with an ambulance scheme called the 1-0-8 Service offered by EMRI (Emergency Medical Research Institute) all over the state. There’s a newer service, called the 104 service, which offers mobile health clinics in the rural areas of Andhra Pradesh.

The services have worked extremely well but the state government is facing criticism for sinking too much money into the project. There is a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court admitted a few weeks ago that the project was awarded without a tender.

In retrospect, it is painfully clear that Satyam’s difficulties were even greater than they appeared when it attempted to transfer $1.5 billion to Maytas Infrastructure, the property development company owned by Ramalinga Raju’s family.

The Satyam office in Hyderabad

At the company’s last quarterly meeting, an institutional investor took centre-stage and asked why Satyam had thousands of crores in a low-interest-bearing current account. Why, he asked pointedly, wasn’t it in a dividend-yielding account where it would earn higher interest?

Today, it is a reasonable question whether there was any money in the account and whether the account even existed. But Raju was prepared to put his own fortune on the line to save the company.