Electoral bond data: Future Gaming and Megha Engineering top donors to political parties

New Delhi: Future Gaming and Hotel Services (Lottery Martin) and Megha Engineering and Infrastructure Ltd head the list of donors to parties through electoral bonds. Late on Thursday, the Election Commission of India (ECI) published details of bond buyers and beneficiaries since April 2019, as per the Supreme Court’s orders, ahead of the 18th Lok Sabha elections.

The data release provides details of electoral bonds worth over Rs 12,000 crore. The information was provided by State Bank of India (SBI), the sole seller of the bonds, and published by the ECI.

Other donor names include the Bharti Group and Vedanta. The information clearly shows the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) got the lion’s share over the years, something that’s also clear from the party’s own annual audit reports.

Future Gaming and Megha Engineering have had encounters with controversy. Future Gaming has been under the Enforcement Directorate’s scrutiny.

Megha Engineering is under fire over the Kaleshwaram lift irrigation project and was also involved with the Silkyara tunnel project in Uttarakhand where several workers were trapped for days last year.Other prominent donors include Essel Mining (an arm of Aditya Birla Group), Haldia Energy of the Goenka group, Jindal Steel, the Mahindra Group and the Dhariwals. Some of India’s largest conglomerates don’t find a mention in the data set, but the entities listed may have connections to them, analysts said. Establishing these links could be a challenging task, they added.Individuals such as Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw also bought electoral bonds besides the likes of liquor distributor Mardi Gras, the Western UP Power Transmission Company and the Keventers group.

Several donors on the SBI list have, in fact, also been regular contributors to political parties earlier through the electoral trust system where donor names were made public. Construction companies such as DLF, Navayuga and BG Shirke figure prominently in data submitted by electoral trusts to the ECI in the past.

After the BJP, trailing far behind are the Trinamool Congress and the Indian National Congress followed by the Bharat Rashtra Samithi, Biju Janata Dal and the DMK.

Announced by the NDA government in 2017-18, the electoral bond scheme, which allowed anonymous funding to political parties, was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on February 15. The apex court ordered that all data of electoral bond donors and beneficiaries should be made public.

More data on electoral bonds, as submitted by political parties to the ECI, is also likely to be published soon, once the apex court releases the documents to the poll panel. The ECI has moved an application in the Supreme Court seeking this, ET has learnt.

It is also expected that petitioners will move the apex court once again to seek that SBI reveal the ‘unique code’ data on electoral bonds to conclusively establish donor and recipient details.

SBI has shared two data sets with EC — the list of electoral bond purchasers and amounts of bond purchased and a separate list of political parties who received them.