April 9: Before falling from grace by admitting to India's biggest accounting fraud, B. Ramalinga Raju was a poster boy of the Indian IT industry who rose to fame with a solution for the highly-feared Y2K crisis at the turn of the 20th century for the entire world.

His first business venture was a spinning and weaving mill, named Sri Satyam, while his undoing came in the form of spinning a fraud amounting to Rs 7,000 crore at Satyam Computer - a company he founded and nurtured although with falsified books.

Raju founded Satyam in 1987 and made it into the country's fourth-largest IT company, which reaped huge profits after making software solutions to tackle the famous Y2K crisis.

It was feared that a worldwide bug would crash computer systems because of abbreviating a four-digit year to two digits, on January 1, 2000, as the systems did not recognise the year 2000 from 1900.

However, post Y2K, Satyam's business began drying up and Raju started dressing up the books to attract clients. Through family members, he also floated other firms with the name Maytas, an anagram of Satyam. It was a financial engineering proposed by him for the acquisition of two Maytas firms by Satyam that led to his undoing.

The crime was "a sophisticated white collar financial fraud with premeditated and well thought of plan and deliberate design for personal gains and to the detriment of the company and investors".

On January 7, 2009, Raju - the then chairman of Satyam - sent off an email to Sebi and the bourses where he admitted to inflating the cash and bank balances of the company, besides understating liabilities and other financial mis-statements.

Sixty-year old Raju, who studied at the Harvard Business School and Ohio University in the US, also remains the first big industrialist with many awards to fall to investor activism.

It was the shareholders in Satyam that blew the lid off his Maytas deal, forcing him to come clean on the long-running falsification of books.

Born into a family of farmers, Raju did his graduation from Loyola College in Vijaywada and went to the US for doing an MBA and other programmes. After his return to India, he kept away from the family's traditional agriculture business and set up a spinning and weaving mill named Sri Satyam.

Soon, Raju shifted to real estate and named his construction company Satyam Constructions.

In 1987, he joined the information technology bandwagon by setting up Satyam Computer Services and made it a public company with a stock market listing in 1992.

He went further to list it in the US later, while spinning a web of falsified books and accounts in between.