The Supreme Court on March 15 sought a response from the State Bank of India (SBI) on the non-disclosure of the unique alphanumeric numbers of individual electoral bonds to the Election Commission of India (ECI) for publication on its official website.
A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, which was hearing an application filed by the ECI seeking a modification of the operative portion of its March 11 order in the electoral bonds case, directed its registrar (judicial) to ensure that the data filed earlier by the poll panel before it in a sealed cover be scanned and digitised.
It said this be preferably carried out by 5 p.m. on Saturday and once the exercise is completed, the original documents be returned to the ECI.
The ECI had given these documents to the court in sealed envelopes and boxes.
On February 15, the five-judge Bench, in its judgment, had directed the ECI to publish, along with the details of electoral bonds in its possession, the confidential information passed on to the court.
The ready availability of the digitised copy of the documents, that too taken by the Supreme Court itself, would help avert any delay in the publication of these records regarding the electoral bonds.
The SBI had said a total of 22,217 electoral bonds were purchased and 22,030 were redeemed by political parties between April 1, 2019 and February 15, 2024. While the remaining 187 were redeemed and the money was deposited in the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund, in accordance with the scheme’s rules.
Future Gaming and Hotel Services PR, whose managing director is the well known lottery magnate Santiago Martin, was the single largest donor to political parties between April 12, 2019 and January 24, 2024, according to the electoral bonds data released by the SBI and published by the ECI on March 14, on the orders of the Supreme Court.
The firm donated a cumulative sum of ₹1,368 crores through electoral bonds during this period. Incidentally, the Enforcement Directorate had attached ₹411 crore in the bank accounts of this firm and other companies in March 2022 and had later filed a prosecution complaint against it under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 before the PMLA Court, Kolkata on September 9, 2023.
While the data on electoral bonds has been released, The Hindu looks to make sense of the data and the takeaways from the Supreme Court verdict.
