Dismissing the State Bank of India’s plea seeking further time to divulge details of electoral bond purchasers, the Supreme Court directed the bank to divulge details by the end of business hours on Tuesday. The Court also directed the Election Commission of India to publish the details on the site by March 15.
Hearing SBI’s plea and contempt plea filed by petitioners against SBI for not fulfilling the order, a five-judge bench comprising Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud, Justices Sanjiv Khanna, B.R. Gavai, J.B. Pardiwala and Manoj Misra called the bank’s plea two days before the deadline as miscellaneous. The bench directed SBI to file an affidavit of its Chairman and Managing Director on compliance with the directions issued.
The bench observed that while it is not inclined to initiate contempt action against the bank, it may be inclined to proceed against it for wilful disobedience if SBI does not comply with the directions by the timelines indicated in this order, Live Law reported.
In a landmark verdict delivered on February 15, a five-judge constitution bench scrapped the Centre's electoral bonds scheme that allowed anonymous political funding, calling it "unconstitutional". The SC directed the SBI to furnish information, including the purchaser of the bonds, their denomination, who encashed the bonds and the date of encashment to the ECI on March 6. The Election Commission of India was then to publish these details on its website by March 13.
However, on March 4, the SBI moved the apex court seeking an extension till June 30 to disclose the details of the sale of 22,217 electoral bonds encashed by political parties.
The SBI contended that retrieval of information from "each silo" and the procedure of matching the information of one silo to that of the other would be a time-consuming exercise. The application said due to stringent measures undertaken to ensure that the identity of the donors was kept anonymous, "decoding" the electoral bonds and matching the donors to the donations would be a complex process.
