Why did the bank not release data for these 3,346 bonds?
In the compliance affidavit, it cited the Supreme Court’s February 2024 judgement that asked it to “submit details of the Electoral Bonds purchased since the Interim order of this Court dated 12 April 2019 till date to the ECI”.
The interim order was passed by a three-judge bench of Ranjan Gogoi, who was then the chief justice, Justice Sanjeev Khanna and Justice Deepak Gupta on April 12, 2019. It asked the bank to submit detailed information for the electoral bonds issued till May 15 of that year to the Election Commission in a “sealed cover”.
By referring to this interim order, the bench led by current Chief Justice DY Chandrachud likely meant to direct the SBI to release data other than what had already been submitted in the sealed cover.
However, the SBI interpreted this as a direction to release information on the bonds issued between April 12, 2019, and February 15, 2024 – opening up a gap in the data.
The sealed cover
The result is that a part of the data contained in the sealed cover is out, while the rest is not.
The sealed cover data would include information for bonds issued in ten phases between March 1, 2018 and May 15, 2019.
This number comes to 11,681 bonds.
Of this, data for 2,522 bonds issued since April 12, 2019, and May 15, 2019, has been disclosed.
But information for 9,159 bonds issued between March 1, 2018 and April 12, 2019 is still missing. These are bonds worth Rs 4,002 crore.
The Election Commission has not yet released the information contained in the “sealed cover”. This, despite the Supreme Court, in an order on March 11, asking it to “forthwith publish the details of the information which was supplied to this Court in pursuance of the interim orders on its official website”.
This report is part of a collaborative project involving three news organisations – Newslaundry, Scroll, The News Minute – and independent journalists.
Project Electoral Bond includes Aban Usmani, Anand Mangnale, Anisha Sheth, Anjana Meenakshi, Ayush Tiwari, Azeefa Fathima, Basant Kumar, Dhanya Rajendran, Jayashree Arunachalam, Joyal George, M Rajshekhar, Maria Teresa Raju, Nandini Chandrashekhar, Neel Madhav, Nikita Saxena, Parth MN, Pooja Prasanna, Prajwal Bhat, Prateek Goyal, Pratyush Deep, Ragamalika Karthikeyan, Raman Kirpal, Ravi Nair, Sachi Hegde, Shabbir Ahmed, Shivnarayan Rajpurohit, Siddharth Mishra, Supriya Sharma, Tabassum Barnagarwala and Vaishnavi Rathore.
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