The Election Commission on Sunday, 17th March, published another set of data related to Electoral Bonds. Earlier on 14th March the ECI had released two sets of data received from SBI, one giving details of purchasers of electoral bonds, and the other giving details of bonds encashed by political parties. However, the two sets of the data were not linked, and it could not be ascertained who donated to which parties.
The data published by EC today is the details of Electoral Bonds received by the political parties up to 30 September 2023. These details were provided by the respective political parties in sealed envelopes to the Election Commission, who in turn had submitted the same to the Supreme Court of India. The Supreme Court registry has scanned and digitised the documents, and the same has been published by the ECI.
As per the data, BJP received ₹6987 crore in Electoral bonds till 30 September. The Trinamool Congress Party received ₹1397 crore, while the Congress party received ₹1334 crore.
Interestingly, while most of the parties have not named the donors, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has provided the names of donors from whom the party received electoral bonds. And as per this data, DMK received ₹509 crore from Future Gaming and Hotel Services Private Limited, the top purchaser of Electoral Bonds.
The party received ₹60 crore in Electoral Bonds from Future Gaming in 2020-21, ₹249 crore in 2021-22, ₹160 crore in 2022-23 and ₹40 crore in 2023-24, totalling ₹5,09,00,00,000.
The company bought bonds worth ₹1368 crores, which means it gave a whopping 37% of its total political donations to DMK alone. Future Gaming and Hotel Services is owned by ‘lottery king’ Santiago Martin, who is named in several scams. The company is known to have close ties with DMK.
DMK received ₹656.5 crore from Electoral Bonds from 2019 to 2023, and out that ₹509 crore came from just one company, Future Gaming. This means, over 77% of donations through electoral bonds were received by DMK from the company facing ED probe.
The party also received ₹105 crore from Megha Infrastructure, the second largest purchaser of Electoral Bonds.
In the fresh data published by EC today, there are details of Electoral Bonds received by 521 political parties, submitted by the parties to the EC. However, the majority of the parties disclosed they didn’t receive any Electoral Bonds. In the data submitted by the State Bank of India, it was seen that 27 parties have encashed political bonds.
ECI also published the images of the sealed envelops submitted by the parties.