The Supreme Court (SC) will hear on Monday the application filed by the State Bank of India (SBI) seeking an extension of time till June 30 to disclose information relating to the Electoral Bonds. The top court will also two contempt petitions filed against SBI chairman Dinesh Kumar Khara for the failure of the Bank to disclose the information by March 6.
The apex court bench, also comprising justices Sanjiv Khanna, B R Gavai, J B Pardiwala, and Manoj Misra, will assemble at 10.30 am to hear the two petitions.
The SC, in its judgement scrapping the Electoral Bond Scheme, had 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.
"It submitted that the data related to the issuance of the bond and the data related to the redemption of the bond was kept recorded in two different silos. No central database was maintained. This was done to ensure that donors' anonymity would be protected," it said.
It also submitted that the donor details were kept in a sealed cover at the designated branches and all such sealed covers were deposited in the main branch of the applicant bank, which is located in Mumbai.
A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud will also hear a separate plea, which has sought initiation of contempt action against the SBI alleging, it "wilfully and deliberately" disobeyed the apex court's direction on Electoral Bonds. The contempt petitions have been filed by NGOs Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), Common Cause and the political party CPI (M).
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".