Hello,
After the Supreme Court stripped away the cloak of anonymity granted to political donors through the electoral bond scheme, a slew of prominent figures and corporates have been exposed. In the last three days, The Reporters’ Collective dug into the now-public electoral bond data and scoured the books to unravel their financial secrets.
Though our team of full-time reporters and editors is compact enough to fit into an SUV, The Collective has, as we have promised its readers, pursued the evidence with all its might.
Surprisingly, one of the first electoral bonds stories to come out of our stable was something that buttressed our previous investigation. Our reporters’ eyes couldn’t miss the two names in the donors’ list that had earlier kept them awake while reporting on the coal block allocation scam.
They found that among the top 20 electoral bonds donors were two RP Sanjiv Goenka firms flagged by CAG. Our investigation had exposed the role of the two firms in rigging bids during the country’s first ever coal auction and how the Centre ignored it.
Then we found that a Reliance Group company donated Rs 410 crore through electoral bonds, making it the third largest donor. In one year, its company Qwik Supply Chain donated Rs 360 crore to political parties when it made a profit of mere Rs 21.72 crore.
If it was the company in one case, the other named in the list was Reliance’s accounts man linked to Network18 buy. He was among the top 100 electoral bonds donors. He could donate because the politicians who envisaged this scheme allowed individuals, zero-revenue companies, NGOs, trusts, Hindu Undivided Family units, and all other entities recognised by law to do so too, providing a proxy tool to companies wishing to keep donations away from scrutiny.
So, who threw the largest amount of money at political parties? It was Santiago Martin, with business interests in gambling and lottery. His little-known company based in Tamil Nadu, Future Gaming and Hotel Services Private Limited, purchased electoral bonds worth Rs 1,368 crore. And in a single year, it gave six times its profit as donation to political parties.
The second largest donor was Megha Group, which had its fingers in central and Telangana projects. It had the knack of snatching government contracts by offering rates that were terrifyingly low for competitors. It donated Rs 1,232 crore.
Then there was a case of hypocrisy that struck the reporter. Uday Kotak, who had publicly questioned the electoral bonds scheme in 2019, donated money through his group.
Keventer Group was also in line to be milked. It donated over Rs 500 crore, nearly 100 times its annual profit, soon after it faced Enforcement Directorate enquiries over an alleged disinvestment scam.
Then came a name that brought alive the ghost of Sohrabuddin Shaikh encounter case. The company owned by Vimal Patni, an accused in the sensational encounter case, donated money.
The encounter case had then top BJP politicians and police officers of Gujarat and Rajasthan, including then Gujarat state home minister and present Union home minister Amit Shah, facing charges of murder and criminal conspiracy. All were acquitted by the court.
There are more such stories up on our website for reading, and many more in the pipeline about the electoral bond contributions, which the Supreme Court said are purely business transactions made with the intent of securing benefits in return.
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