Raju ban gaya not-so-gentleman?

Whatrsquos power if not those you canrsquot express so openly against And this applies to both groups and individualsAs for hard political power as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin once famously promised Therersquos freedom of speech Unsure if freedom after speechThe recent crackerjack Netflix documentary CoverUp on the life and times of Americarsquos top investigative journalist Seymour Hersh feels instructive thenWhile Hersh could lsquopelorsquo the powerful Pentagon over My Lai massacre during Vietnam War or rub Nixonrsquos nose to the ground as US President veritably in the land of the free mdash itrsquos when he switched over to report on corporate America that it was ldquothe beginning of the endrdquo for him at the New York Times NYTThe usual collusion of big media and mega corporations apart mdash wherein the advertiser becomes by default the mediumrsquos owner mdash consider the corporate fraud that Hersh was investigating with a conglomerate ldquohiding moneyprofitsrdquo between unrelated entitiesIt was about favourable loans issued to top executives Thatrsquos exactly what had gone on inside the NYT itselfThat said take the case of the IT giant Satyamrsquos founder Ramalinga Raju with interests in unrelated entities under another company Maytas Satyam spelt backwardsSupriya Sobti Gupta the producer of the showHersquod fudged accounts to shoot up Satyam stocksEventually pushed against the wall Raju publicly confessed to this fraud Would he have if Satyam wasnrsquot listed at the New York Stock Exchange in the US My sense is noSupriya Sobti Gupta whorsquos produced the fourpart Netflix doc series Bad Boy Billionaires BBB kinda agrees with me BBB if you recall mdash detailing rise and fall of Indiarsquos alleged robber barons Vijay Mallya Nirav Modi Subrata Roy mdash dropped October 2020Only the last episode on SatyamRaju Riding the Tiger disappeared after promosRaju had participated in the series But sensing the title lsquoBad Boy Billionairersquo hinted at harming his image he obtained a court injunction arguing that it could also influence his ongoing legal caseRajursquos served 33 months in prison Hersquos out on bailAfter over five years of litigation a Hyderabad court lifted the supposed ban That 50minute episode is finally out on Netflix What does it reveal about the infamous Satyam scandalInvestigative journalist Seymour Hersh in a still from the documentary lsquoCoverUprsquoMy favourite bitrsquos 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 reservesExcept he didnrsquot hold an HDFC accountParekh was personally involved in the damagecontrol post the Satyam scandal upon insistence of the governmentItrsquos incredible how in about six months of the US financial meltdown of September 2008 mdash that placed Satyamrsquos books under scrutiny mdash the company had been sold off to Tech Mahindra April 2009Until then Raju was the father of Indiarsquos techoutsourcing industry Which boomed in 1999 as journalist Raghu Karnad puts it in BBB when that ldquogorgeous absurdityrdquo called the Y2K problem to do with computer systems turned out to be a ldquodamp squibrdquo Several Indian IT firms benefitedSatyam remained the perennial number four mdash after TCS Infosys Wipro mdash with the ldquonumber fivethree problemrdquo As in you never wanna slip under But what if you ldquocooked booksrdquo to move one up or stay on at leastOnce Satyamrsquos stocks got wiped out people lost thousands of crores overnight But thatrsquos the risk in the offer document that investors takeWhich marginally separates Raju from Mallya from Indiarsquos South Modi West Roy East featured in BBBThe former two allegedly blew away depositorsrsquo money from governmentowned banks The latterrsquos wealth reportedly came from shady chitfund schemes in villagessmall townsAlso unlike the other three Raju belongs to the tribe of oldworld Indian business whorsquod rather be anonymous and rich mdash than famous hence more vulnerableHis fall you notice attracted lesszero schadenfreude from lay public Maybe a podcast could still somewhat restore his imageI asked producer Supriya what it was like to meet Raju at his family villagehome mdash the interview that didnrsquot subsequently make it to the documentary She called him ldquoenigmardquo Thatrsquos what emerges from BBB tooShe said ldquoThose who donrsquot know him since Satyam think hersquos probably in jail Those who do regard him still as the man who built Hyderabad bringing tech jobs into the city in tens of thousandsrdquoRaju also owns a lotta land Hersquos financially fine Surely he doesnrsquot deem himself a scamster mdash only as someone who did business as itrsquos done sometimes Money floats mysteriously at the topFine financial journalist Sucheta Dalal says in BBB that Satyamrsquos numbers would repeatedly fail the ldquosmell testrdquo Yet nobody mdash board auditors press mdash could detect the stench over quartersyearsSupriya whorsquos also directed Caught Out 2023 on Indian cricket matchfixing used to be a BBC Al Jazeera journalist I ask her if itrsquos easier to get interviewees onboard a Netflix doc since it survives newscycles She feels yes And therefore minutest inspectionWhile BBB is essentially an entertaining explainer rather than an exposeacute Netflix has probably spent more on litigation than actually producing itOnly greater viewership can justify such persistenceexpenses Hardly any Seymour Hershes around Hence this noteMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass cultureHe tweets mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper