Satyam Computing Services founder jailed over $1.4 BILLION fraud

Re: In his defence...

Certainly looks like India takes the kid gloves to the white collar country club buddy criminals just like their US counterparts for the most part as well.

Re: Crims today - no forward thinking.

The Satyam tale of woe was not that the head honcho defrauded the company of $1.4bn to his own benefit, but that the board deliberately mis-stated the financial results one quarter to meet earnings expectations. Unfortunately, as various others (Worldcom, Enron and many others) have found, the starting assumption of the board is always wrong: "we'll pay it back in next quarter's results, and nobody will be any the wiser", and then they found themselves missing next quarters expectations and making up some extra sales to fill in that hole. Each time they did it, it became exponentially more difficult that they could ever set the books right, and so it went on until the wheels fell off.

This is because if you were 5% down in the first quarter and "bring forward" some sales to make target, then not only do you need to make higher growth expectations next quarter (both because investors believe you're already growing faster than you are, and also their starting baseline assumption is now too high) but you've got to recover that 5% you borrowed as well. As soon as you start on this road you're doomed. Remember this guy's quote about managing expectations (after he was caught) "it was like riding a tiger, we just didn't know how to get off".

So he made a few million dollars in bonuses and salary, with perhaps as little as $1-5m actually his personal benefit from the fraud compared to the slightly reduced bonus he'd have made playing a straight bat. The $1.4bn was the implied lost value to shareholders because any buyer of a company that has suffered accounting fraud will never pay fair value because they don't know what they're buying.