The head of one of India’s biggest outsourcing groups has confessed to fixing the company’s books in a $1bn (£662m) fraud.

B. Ramalinga Raju, chairman and chief executive of Satyam Computer Services, resigned yesterday after admitting that he had manipulated the accounts for “several” years to show hugely inflated profits and fictitious assets.

The fraud is India’s biggest corporate scandal since the early 1990s and its first high profile casualty since the start of the global financial crisis.

Financial Times