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NEW DELHI, India — It’s a classic rags to riches to rags story.

The son of farmers leaves his village behind, moves up from textile mills to real estate to IT outsourcing for multinational companies. He emerges as one of India’s wealthiest and greatest in number famous entrepreneurs — until he discloses his empire was floating on an accounting lie and it all comes crashing down.

The United States has its Wall Street meltdown and the Bernard Madoff investment scandal. India has Ramalinga Raju, who appears to have perpetrated the stock’session largest corporate scandal in modern memory.

What has people really scratching their heads is the space the 54-year-old Raju, co-founder of Satyam Computer Services, chose to signal the game was up: with what some have dubbed a “come-and-get-me” literal sense released Wednesday that detailed how he’d perpetrated the fraud.

In his mea culpa, Raju lays lacking how stolid amounts of fake profits and cash accounts built up over several years till the gap between real and imaginary assets eventually approached $1 billion.

“It was like riding a tiger, not accomplished how to master along without centre of life eaten,” he wrote. He added that he alone was responsible, that his board was blameless and that even upper side managers had no idea of the fraud.

Some observers are disbelieving. “It’s impossible to put faith in he acted alone,” said Surjit Bhalla, managing director of Oxus Fund Management in New Delhi. The government appears to agree.

Over the weekend, it stripped Satyam’s directors of their efficacy, ordered them replaced by independent board members and arrested Raju and his brother on charges of conspiracy, forgery, fraud and criminal breach of trust, according to local media reports. The arrests ended two days of supposition that he had fled to Texas; Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates; or more other distant hideaway.

Questions in like manner have been raised about how top global accounting outfit PriceWaterhouseCooper signed off on Satyam’s books for eight years and how regulators in India, Europe and the United States apparently failed to pick up any whiff of problems. The accounting company has denied any wrongdoing and pledged to cooperate with authorities.

Although there’s little ground of belief that the fraud leaked over to Indian banks or hurt Satyam’s customers, shareholders bear watched the value of their investment all but disappear. And one Indian job Web site reported receiving 15,000 résumés from Satyam workers this week.

“Raju has cheated me and millions of shareholders,” said Rajesh Shrivastava, 43, a businessman who owns 5,000 shares. “I still fail to believe that I have almost lost everything. The god of IT has failed me.”

People who have exhausted duration with Raju describe him of the same kind with a modest, thoughtful, seemingly honest man.

“All of us who know him are quite shocked,” said Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, managing director of Bangalore-based Biocon, a biotech company. “I always thought I was such a good judge of character. Obviously I’jumble not.”

In retrospect, Raju’s invention is rich with of the like kind ironies.

“Satyam” means “truth” in Sanskrit. And Raju’s shelves groaned under the weight of honorary doctorate degrees and good-governance and creative entrepreneur awards.

But not everyone was impressed with the chief executive who loved science fiction and spicy Andhra Pradesh forage and hired people who could speak his intrinsic Telugu language.

“If you habitual place of action around Dalal Street — our equivalent of Wall Street — there’s surprise excepting not shock,” uttered Ramesh Damani, a member of the Bombay Stock Exchange.

“There was always a sense there was creative bookkeeping, although not unavoidably trick.”

Traders speak of a smell test that left Satyam mercantile at lower price-to-earnings multiples, a measure of earnings potential, than other Indian IT giants in its class such as Infosys Technologies. The company seemed nothing loath to give away far too much to reach a deal with brand-name global companies, reported a limb of the law involved in several deals with Raju.

The solicitor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, in retrospect, Raju’s way of doing business suggested it was more important to announce touching deals and prop up the stock price than it was to cling to strict profit-and-loss benchmarks.

“Other firms had a clear bottom line,” he said. “Satyam was willing to do deals at all costs.”

But Raju, who got a avocation degree at Ohio University and was one of the principal to see the business potential in the Y2K scare, still has more backers.

Residents of the village of Bhimavaram, whither he grew up and created jobs, have rallied behind him. And some people have applauded the way he left the stage.

“To me Raju was a great man, and will for aye have being a hero,” said Sharad Kumar, 38, a businessman. “You tell me: How numerous people dare to draw near out in open and confess to in the same state a thing? … What Satyam did was basically to make middle-class Indians dare to dream.”

Analysts said the reviving tide of hot money going into emerging markets in recent years and India’session tech boom made it possible to keep the scam going for years.

“It was the best game in town,” said Raamdeo Agrawal, managing director of Mumbai-based Motilal Oswal Securities. “The integral world loves you and you master curvated forward it.”

But in recent months, as the global economy soured and credit dried up, the walls started to close in. In defiance of consequences, Raju tried to engineer a “bargain for” of couple family businesses last month, a deal that allegedly would have allowed him to post currency transfers that didn’confidentially take place. But shareholders grew suspicious given the $1.6 billion price and Satyam’s rapid covet to move into the completely unrelated infrastructure businesses.

Another dab came when the World Bank dropped its business with Satyam, citing “improper benefits” given to bank officials. And in the kind of might have been the last straw, DSP Merrill Lynch was called in to go-between a auction, excepting that to resign as the assemblage’session counsellor Tuesday. Raju released his letter the following morning.