The head of one of India’s biggest outsourcing groups has confessed to fixing the company’s books in a $1bn fraud described as the country’s “Enron”.

B. Ramalinga Raju, chairman and chief executive of Satyam Computer Services, resigned on Wednesday after admitting 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.