A day after the State Bank of India (SBI) filed compliance affidavit in Supreme Court, saying it has furnished details of electoral bonds to Election Commission of India (EC), the Election Commission on Thursday disclosed the details on their website in two parts as 'Disclosure of Electoral Bonds submitted by SBI'.
About the data disclosed by EC
As per the data released by the Election Commission of India (ECI), the list of donors to political parties includes Grasim Industries, Megha Engineering, Piramal Enterprises, Torrent Power, Bharti Airtel, DLF Commercial Developers, Vedanta Ltd, Apollo Tyres, Lakshmi Mittal, Edelweiss, PVR, Keventer, Sula Wine, Welspun, Sun Pharma amongst several others.
Among the known corporates, Agarwal's Vedanta Ltd bought Rs 398 crore worth of bonds, while Sunil Mittal's three companies together purchased a total of Rs 246 crore worth of bonds.
Steel magnate Lakshmi Niwas Mittal bought Rs 35 crore worth of bonds in his individual capacity. Hyderabad-based Megha Engineering, which has bagged contracts of several large infrastructure projects, bought bonds worth Rs 966 crore.
The parties that redeemed electoral bonds include the BJP, Congress, AIADMK, BRS, Shiv Sena, TDP, YSR Congress, DMK, JDS, NCP, Trinamool Congress, JDU, RJD, AAP, and the Samajwadi Party, according to the data.
The top court had given the Election Commission time till 5 pm of March 15 to upload the data on its website.
Earlier, after submitting the detailed reports, the State Bank of India (SBI) told the Supreme Court that all details of date of purchase of electoral bonds, names of purchasers and their denominations have been furnished to Election Commission.
Upon receiving the detailed reports from SBI in compliance with the SC order, Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar earlier said the Election Commission would disclose all details on electoral bonds in time.
The SBI on Wednesday also told the Supreme Court that a total of 22,217 electoral bonds were purchased and 22,030 redeemed by political parties between April 1, 2019 and February 15 this year.
The affidavit was filed by SBI's chairman Dinesh Kumar Khara.
In a landmark verdict delivered on February 15, a five-judge Constitution bench had scrapped the Centre's electoral bonds scheme that allowed anonymous political funding, calling it "unconstitutional" and ordered disclosure by the EC of donors, the amount donated by them and the recipients.
