Electoral Bonds: Supreme Court dismissed SBI plea seeking extension!

The Supreme Court has dismissed a plea, which was submitted by the State Bank of India (SBI) on Monday. This plea was to extend the deadline set by the top court for furnishing details of electoral bonds encashed by political parties since April 12, 2019. But the honorable supreme Court has dismissed this.

Extension of deadline to furnish details on electoral bonds has been dismissed!

“Submissions of SBI in application indicates that info sought is readily available. thus the application by SBI seeking extension of time until June 30 is dismissed. SBI is directed to disclose the details by the close of business hours of March 12, 2024,” the Court ordered. The order also said, “Though we are not exercising the contempt jurisdiction, but we place SBI put on notice that this court will proceed against it for wilful disobedience of court if it does not adhere to the directions issued by the court.” 

“Directions of this court requires SBI to disclose info which is already available with it. the FAQs on electoral bonds state that the KYC documents must be submitted by the purchaser each time that the bond is purchased irrespective of that purchaser has a KYC verified purchaser account. Thus, details of EB purchased and directed to be disclosed is readily available,” the order further said. The Court has also noted that the process of decoding electoral bonds and relating donor to the donee is a time consuming exercise and that information is not available in digital format. “There is a large number of data sets to decipher and a total of 22,217 bonds were purchased between April 2019 to Feb 2024 and this will lead to 44,000 plus data sets since there are two silos of info and thus compilation will be time consuming process,” the SBI had submitted.