Supreme Court asks SBI to disclose numbers of electoral bonds

Supreme Court of India.
| Photo Credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap

The Supreme Court on Friday, March 15, 2024, issued a notice to the State Bank of India asking why the unique alpha numeric number identifying individual electoral bonds were not handed over to the Election Commission of India for publication.

The court listed the case on March 18.

“Why did you not disclose the electoral bonds’ numbers?”, asked the five-judge Bench of the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice of India D. Y. Chandrachud on Friday.

The apex court said that it will scan and digitise the documents given by the ECI and return the originals to the poll body. The top court will do the scanning/digitising work by 5 p.m. on Saturday.

It will retain a digitised copy and also share the digitised version with the ECI in order to obviate the poll body from digitising the original again for publication in the official website.

Future Gaming and Hotel Services PR, whose managing director is the well known lottery magnate Santiago Martin, was the single largest donor to political parties between April 12, 2019 and January 24, 2024, according to the electoral bonds data released by the State Bank of India and published by the Election Commission of India on March 14, on the orders of the Supreme Court.