 "electoral bonds, funding, election, election funding")
Top purchaser of electoral bonds Future Gaming and Hotel Services donated Rs 509 crore to Tamil Nadu’s ruling party Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) through the now-scrapped payment mode, the Election Commission’s (EC) data showed on Sunday.
The donations given by Future Gaming, whose owner, “lottery king” Santiago Martin, has been under the Enforcement Directorate’s (ED) scanner, accounted for more than 77 per cent of the total receipts from electoral bonds of Rs 656.5 crore disclosed by the DMK.
Since most political parties have not disclosed the names of the donors, it was not known who were the beneficiaries of the balance Rs 859 crore worth bonds purchased by Future Gaming.
The disclosure is part of the data dump pertaining to a total of 523 recognised and non-recognised political parties made public by the EC on the Supreme Court’s orders. This was followed by another dataset published by the EC last week based on the information submitted by the State Bank of India (SBI), the sole bank authorised to sell and redeem electoral bonds.
The latest dataset released by the EC included scanned copies of the disclosures made by the political parties, running into hundreds of pages.
While initially the data submitted by the SBI pertained to a period from April 12, 2019 till the scrapping of the bonds by the apex court last month, the latest disclosure is based on the declarations given by various political parties in November last year on the bonds redeemed by them since the scheme was launched in early 2018 and exclude the last few tranches.
