SBI can never match electoral bond donors to parties: Ex-finance Secy

FORMER FINANCE Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg said on Thursday that the details of who bought electoral bonds, when and for how much, and which parties deposited EBS, with the date and amount, was available to State Bank of India, but matching each EB with its recipient was a task that was impossible.

Garg, who was Economic Affairs Secretary when the Electoral Bond Scheme, 2018 was being formulated by the department in 2017, told The Indian Express that SBI’S application to thesupremecourtmondayseeking 3 months more to provide data, was a “cooked up excuse”. The SC on February 15 struck down the electoral bond scheme

Subhash Chandra Garg

and asked SBI to furnish details of donors and parties to the EC by March 6. The EC would make the data public by March 13.

Garg said the SC had asked SBI for details of bonds bought, the date and the amount. While the SBI application said it would need till June 30 to match the donors withthedonationsasthedatawas held in physical form in separate silos,gargsaidthiswasnotsomething the SC asked for. He said the bank was trying to lead the court into a “wild goose chase”.

“Evenifonetakesintoaccount theymaynothaveenteredthedenomination separately, the information of who bought, on what date, how much of the electoral bondisavailableonthecomputer. Similarly, who deposited, for how much of the EB amount, and on whichdate,that’salsoavailableon the computers as that was depositedintheiraccounts.that’sall the SC has asked for...,” he said.

“The donor name is available for the amount of EB purchased, what is not available is for which particular bond, who bought it. Since all bonds have come back to SBI, even if you get access to a bond, you can’t determine who had purchased this bond and who had deposited it. So what SBI is saying is that ‘we will need this much time to make this connection’, they will never be able to do it. It is a cooked up excuse.”