On Thursday, as SBI reluctantly parted with unique codes that link electoral bond donors to its recipients, it laid bare the secret give-and-take relationship between the corporate world and the political parties.
The Reporters’ Collective bushwhacked through hundreds of corporate documents to make sense of the donations. Though officially electoral bonds are a campaign fundraiser, most of these donations came across as slush funds to ward off government investigations, return gifts for contracts awarded, or just plain baksheesh to keep politicians off their back.
Let me give you snapshots of the stories that we told over the last two days, starting with the donations of the largest electoral bond donor.
Lottery king Santiago Martin’s main business house Future Gaming is a baffling enterprise with its high revenue and mysteriously low profit. Still it gave away eye-popping electoral bond donations -- higher than their profits. It donated Rs 1,368 crore in total, spread out mainly among the regional parties running governments in states where he ran his businesses.
An examination into his financial maze reveals that Future Gaming and Hotel Services Private Limited has been hollowing out exchequers of several states to fuel his empire spanning over 12 sectors, including real-estate, healthcare, hospitality, textiles and software and technology.
Kolkata-based Keventer Group gave over Rs 320 crore to BJP in electoral bonds – half of its total donations – just when the Enforcement Directorate was snapping at its heels over a disinvestment case. Keventer Group was embroiled in an investigation into whether the state government undervalued its shares while selling its stake in Metro Dairy, a joint venture with the group in the dairy sector.
We found evidence that two donors linked to Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Group donated the majority of their electoral bonds to BJP. Of the Rs 435 crore donated in total, BJP received Rs 400 crore.
These recent disclosures by the SBI also helped us close an investigation. In 2019, we reported that SBI had allowed an unknown political party to encash electoral bonds worth Rs 10 crore even though they came two days after the legally mandated 15-day period to encash bonds had ended. The Union government had given sanction to SBI to break rules to encash expired bonds. But we didn’t know who walked into the bank to encash the expired bonds.
Now, almost 5 years later, we found out that the Union Finance Ministry allowed SBI to break the rule and accept the expired bonds drawn in BJP’s favour.
Ever heard the Bible saying ‘Give one if you have two’? It seems some of our corporate giants have gone beyond it, managing to donate even when they had none.
While running their businesses at a loss, these corporations managed to dish out hundreds of crores to politicians through electoral bonds. At least 16 of the top 200 firms in the electoral bonds list donated even when they ran their business in loss.
While running at a loss they cumulatively donated a whopping Rs 710 crore to political parties. Of this, Rs 460 crore (over 60%) went to BJP.
What made this possible was a tweak in law to allow a company that didn’t make profits to donate how much ever they want, unlike the earlier law that capped the donation at a certain percentage of the profits they earned over the years.
If the cap had been retained, 16 of these 200 companies would not have been allowed to donate a rupee to the political parties. Furthermore, these 200 firms together would have been permitted to donate only Rs 21 lakh this year. But the fact is: these companies together donated Rs 8,700 crore to political parties.
There are other stories too. Check out our Electoral Bonds Tracker page.
We have also launched an interactive database on electoral bonds. The Collective has collaborated with the folks at MLexperts.ai. Their team of researchers helped us with an in-depth analysis of the electoral bond donations. With this database, a work in progress, we try to track the donations to political parties in electoral bonds – to create a timeline of who donated, when and who got it.
For instance, when you choose an electoral bond donor entity, the tracker will throw up the company specifics, graphs plotting donation amounts, events such as raids and elections, helping you see through the motives of the donation.