For broadcast journalists, B. Ramalinga Raju, the dapper fromer chairman of Satyam, presented something of an enigma.

He was always extremely keen "to do media" but whenever he appeared in front of the camera to discuss the company he started from scratch in Hyderabad 1987 and built into a multi-billion-dollar IT giant he seemed to have little to say.

"Frankly, he was just a little dull," said a producer for a leading financial news channel.

If ever there was a instance of still waters running deep, this was one. Behind his hum-drum façade, Mr Raju had set into motion a $1 billion financial scandal the likes of which had never before been seen in India. Today, the understated 57-year-old's description of his wrongdoing has the country engrossed.

He described a fraud that started as an effort to smooth over a minor accounting irregularity by inflating profits, but which adopted a life of its own.

Mr Raju even suggested that he had come within a whisker of pulling the whole thing off and that he might have covered his tracks had he been allowed to sell Satyam two struggling property businesses he largely owned for $1.6 billion and then played around with the deal payments. His frankness in describing his misdeeds was disarming.

He also insisted that he had not gained a single rupee through his deception, but sympathy for him will be thin.

The revelation of the scandal – quickly christened "India's Enron" – marked an ignominious end for one of India's entrepreneurial champions.

Satyam (the name means "truth" in Sanskrit) was created when Mr Raju branched out from his family's construction business to start a software shop.

For many years, the company had been regarded as a distant fourth in the league of India's largest IT companies, trailing TCS, Infosys and Wipro. But more recently its record of delivering healthy margins had wooed many doubters.

On Monday, the Economic Times, India's biggest-selling business newspaper, had marvelled that Satyam, whatever its corporate governance problems, was turning in a better financial performance than its peers.

Meanwhile, Mr Raju was an award-winning pillar of India's business community, a regular at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the premier gathering of the planet's great and good, and a former head of Nasscom, the body that champions the Indian IT industry overseas.

With the accolades came expectations, and executives at other Indian IT firms were furious yesterday at the thought that their own reputations may be tarnished by Mr Raju's wrongdoing. "Satyam's problems were limited to Satyam," one said. "But Raju has queered the pitch for us all." Indeed, many in India may interpret his actions as a personal betrayal, Bharat Iyer, a strategist with JP Morhgan suggested yesterday, "like a punch which catches you unawares."

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