At 7.53 pm and 7.55 pm today, the Election Commission uploaded on its website details on electoral bonds submitted by the State Bank of India.

The first file, titled Part I, contains names of “purchasers” – companies that bought electoral bonds – with the date of purchase and denomination. This document runs into 337 pages.

Part II, which is 426 pages, contains names of the political parties that encashed the bonds, with denominations and dates.

These are the contents of the two PDFs submitted by the SBI earlier this week, after the Supreme Court refused to extend its deadline in the case. The PDFs were loaded onto a pen drive; the passwords to access them were handed over separately in an envelope.

Newslaundry had earlier reported an ostensible pattern between central agency action and Rs 335 crore in donations to the BJP by 30 companies during the last five financial years. We later found 11 other companies – which donated Rs 62.27 crore to the BJP from 2016-17 to 2022-23, and faced central agency action during the same period.

Turns out that many of those companies are also part of the list of electoral bond buyers. For example, Yashoda Hospitals bought 162 bonds worth Rs 1 crore each between October 4, 2021 and October 11, 2023. 

The Hyderabad-based group consists of a chain of hospitals, including four hospitals, four heart institutes and four cancer institutes. It was launched in the eighties by the Rao brothers, Ravender, Surender and Devender. The family is related to Telangana’s former Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao.

The group, which has been accused of being favoured by the erstwhile KCR government in Telangana, donated Rs 2.5 lakh to the BJP in 2019-20. In December 2020, several of its premises were searched across Telangana, and the very next year, the group donated to the BJP – Rs 10 crore in 2021-22 and Rs 5 lakh in 2022-23.

Who else is part of the list? Watch this space for more.

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