Early on Monday morning, the chairman of the government-appointed board of Satyam Computer Services, Kiran Karnik, hurried into the Taj President Hotel in south Mumbai to begin one of India’s strangest corporate sell-offs.

He was immediately accosted by two Indian television reporters who were quickly ejected from the hotel by a phalanx of walkie-talkie-wielding security guards. But the journalists did not have to wait long to hear the outcome of the auction of Satyam, India’s fourth-largest outsourcing company that was put on sale earlier this year after falling victim to the country’s biggest corporate fraud.