ADR said SBI “has deliberately filed” the application regarding electoral bonds “at the last moment in order to ensure that the details of donors and the amount of donations are not disclosed” before the Lok Sabha polls.

The Supreme Court on Thursday said it will look into a request to list for hearing a contempt petition filed by the NGO Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) which was one of those on whose plea a five-judge Constitution bench had struck down the Electoral Bonds Scheme on February 15, 2024.

Advocate Prashant Bhushan appearing for the NGO, urged the bench presided by Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud to hear the plea on March 11 when he said the SBI application too is likely to be taken up. CJI Chandrachud asked him to send an email to the court as per the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) once the petition is verified by the Registry, and he will then look into it.

The ADR plea referred to an application filed by the State Bank of India (SBI) seeking an extension of time till June 30, 2024, for submitting details of electoral bonds to the Election Commission of India (ECI), and said the application “is mala fide and demonstrates a wilful and deliberate disobedience & defiance of the judgement passed by the Constitution Bench…”.

ADR contended that SBI “has deliberately filed” the application on March 4, 2024, “at the last moment in order to ensure that the details of donors and the amount of donations are not disclosed to the public before the upcoming Lok Sabha elections” and that it “neither discloses the progress made so far & steps taken to comply with the judgment…nor it shows even part-compliance of the judgment…”.

ADR pointed out that the affidavit supporting the application has “neither been sworn by the Chairman or the Managing Director of State Bank of India” but by a “low-level functionary of SBI namely one Mr. Narendra Pratap Singh who describes himself to as Assistant General Manager working at Corporate Centre, State Bank of India, Mumbai”. The petition said, “It is surprising that his name does not even figure in the list of 59 high-ranking officers working at Corporate Centre Mumbai as per SBI’s website”.

The plea said, “SBI has the record of the unique number allotted to each Electoral Bond and the KYC details of its purchaser. That the requirement of the KYC is mentioned in Section 4 of the EB scheme itself, therefore, the SBI is well aware of the identity of purchasers of each Electoral Bond”. “It is inconceivable that SBI does not have the recorded information readily available within its database”.

ADR said the Centre in its affidavit of March 15, 2019, stated “the scheme envisages building a transparent system of acquiring bonds with validated KYC and on audit trail. It is further admitted by UOI that KYC documents, PAN, details of identity, and address in full of the donor are recorded by the SBI”.

The plea said as per experts “since each electoral bond has a unique number, a simple query on the database can generate a report in a particular format which does not require any manual verification. That sealed envelopes are only physical instruments like a cheque, the actual transaction of the cheque being deposited is in the database that can be easily extracted by generating a software query”.

In the plea, ADR also pointed out that SBI’s website shows it has 2,60,000 employees, 22,500 worldwide branches administered by a headquarters, 17 local head offices, 101 zonal offices and 208 foreign offices in 36 countries and that “it is hard to believe that SBI is not able to gather information which SBI has itself recorded”.

The plea said an RTI query had shown that SBI had “spent Rs 60,43,005 on IT system development” for management of the bonds, operational cost was Rs 89,72,338 and net cost for floating of EBs was Rs 1,50,15,338. “This implies that a well-functioning IT system is already in place with respect to management of sale and redemption of electoral bonds”.

Pointing out that only 19 out of the 29 SBI authorised branches sold Electoral Bonds and 14 SBI branches encashed them, it said “data available as of January 2024 further shows that only 25 Political Parties had opened their account and are eligible for encashing Electoral Bonds” and “therefore, compiling of this information should not be difficult as the system is already in place”.

ADR contended, “It is mandatory that SBI furnishes all information relating to electoral bonds within stipulated time frame…as voters will not be able to exercise their informed opinion properly during Lok Sabha 2024 if complete information about EBs is not shared with them”.

“Any form of anonymity in the political parties’ finances goes against the essence of participatory democracy and People’s Right to Know enshrined under Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution. Availability of information about EBs will give voters a chance to truly inspect, express and decide their choices”, it said.

“This defiant approach of the SBI towards citizens’ ‘Right to know’ about huge sums of money received by parties through Electoral bonds and corporates in a non-transparent and unaccountable manner is reprehensible and betrays its clear motive to stifle citizen’s voice and right to audit actions of the political class, and therefore it should be held as a serious breach of contempt by this Hon’ble court”.