State Bank of India moves Supreme Court for extension of deadline to furnish details on electoral bonds

The State Bank of India (SBI) has asked the Supreme Court for an extension till June 30 to comply with the latter's recent judgment directing the bank to provide details of all electoral bonds encashed from April 2019 onwards..In an application filed just before the Court-mandated deadline of Wednesday, March 6, the public-sector bank through Advocate Sanjay Kapur has stressed 'certain practical difficulties' in completing the exercise."Due to the stringent measures undertaken to ensure that the identity of the donors was kept anonymous, “decoding” of the Electoral bonds and the matching of the donor to the donations made would be a complex process...details of purchases made at the Branches are not maintained centrally at any one place...was kept recorded in two different silos...This was done so as to ensure that donors’ anonymity would be protected", it is stated..A five-judge Constitution Bench of Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud and Justices Sanjiv Khanna, BR Gavai, JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra had last month unanimously quashed the Electoral Bonds Scheme. Pertinently, it had asked SBI to immediately stop the issue of Electoral Bonds, and further directed:1. SBI should submit the details of the political parties that have received contributions through electoral bonds from April 12, 2019, till date to the Election Commission of India (ECI).2. SBI (in the information given to ECI) must disclose details of each electoral bond encashed by political parties, which shall include the date of encashment and the denomination of the electoral bond. This information is to be submitted to the ECI by March 6, 2024.3. The ECI shall publish this information on its official website within one week of receiving this information from the SBI, that is by March 13.4. Electoral bonds which are within the validity period of 15 days but which have not been encashed by political parties yet, shall be returned by the political parties to the purchaser depending on who is in possession of the bond to the issuing bank..SBI has now stated that re-matching the data would be a task requiring significant amount of effort. "In order to make available donor information, the date of issue of each bond will have to be checked, and matched against the date of purchase by a particular donor. This exercise would only deal with the first silo of information. These Bonds were redeemed by the Political Parties in their designated Bank accounts. Accordingly this information would then have to be matched against the bond redemption information that makes up the second silo," it explained..The Electoral Bonds Scheme had allowed donors to anonymously send funds to a political party after buying bearer bonds from the SBI.It was introduced introduced through the Finance Act, 2017, which in turn amended three other statutes - the Reserve Bank of India Act, the Income Tax Act and the Representation of People Act.Various petitions were filed before the top court challenging at least five amendments made to different statutes through the Finance Act, 2017 on the ground that they have opened doors to unlimited, unchecked funding of political parties..Six years later, the apex court rejected the Central government's stance that the scheme was transparent.The Court, inter alia, opined that such electoral bonds are not the least intrusive measure to curb black money, which was one of the government's stated objectives in introducing the controversial scheme..Supreme Court directions on Electoral Bonds: SBI should immediately stop issue; political parties should refund and more