Satyam founder guilty in India's biggest corporate fraud scandal

MUMBAI (Reuters) - A court on Thursday pronounced the founder of Satyam Computer Services Ltd, Ramalinga Raju, guilty of forging documents and falsifying accounts, in the country's biggest-ever corporate accounting fraud.

A court in Hyderabad - the home city of what was once one of India's largest IT outsourcing companies - also found guilty Raju's brother and ex-Satyam managing director, B. Rama Raju, as well as eight other former Satyam executives, special public prosecutor K. Surender said.

The court sentenced Raju to seven years of imprisonment and fined him 2.5 million rupees ($40,180.01), local television reported.

Former founder and chairman Raju in 2009 said Satyam had overstated profits and falsified assets for years, in a fraud later determined to be $1.5 billion in size.

Satyam was sold the same year to Indian software services company Tech Mahindra Ltd with which it later merged.

($1 = 62.2200 rupees)

(Reporting by Nivedita Bhattacharjee; Writing by Sumeet Chatterjee; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier and Christopher Cushing)