Don't know the donors, envelopes were left at the office: JD(U), TMC on 2019 electoral bond disclosure

After the electoral bonds data was released as part of the disclosure of 2018-19, Trinamool Congress and JD(U) said that some unknown donors left sealed envelopes in their offices.

Mentioning that they are unaware of the donors' identities, they said that the envelopes were handed to their respective offices, as reported by The Times Of India.

"Somebody came to our office on 03.04.2019 at Patna and handed over a sealed envelope and when it was opened, we found a bunch of electoral bonds containing 10 bonds of Rs 1 crore each," JD(U) said.

As the Election Commission made public hundreds of sealed-cover disclosures submitted to it by various political parties, filings made by Bihar's ruling party showed that it got electoral bonds totalling more than Rs 24 crore.

As per TOI, in its submission on May 27, 2019, to EC, TMC said, "Most of these bonds were sent to our office and dropped in the drop box or sent through messengers from various persons who wished to support our party, many of whom prefer to remain anonymous. thus, we are not in the possession of names and other details of the buyers."

TMC had not disclosed the identities of the donors whose contributions amounting to Rs 75 crore were received by the party from July 16, 2018, to May 22, 2019.

However, JD(U) has given information about their donors whose contributions amounted to Rs 3 crore, that they got in April 2019, but has not disclosed information about the remaining Rs 10 crore.

The two donors that they disclosed were Shree Cement Limited of Rajasthan's Ajmer and Bharti Airtel Limited of Haryana's Gurgaon. They donated Rs 2 crore and Rs 1 crore respectively in April 2019.

On the other hand, JD(U)'s submission said they cannot provide any further details.

"Neither we know, nor we tried to know because when we received the bonds, order of supreme court was not in existence and only the gazette notification of Government of India was in operation," the submission read, as quoted by the publication.

TMC did not reveal the information about their donors, however, they said that one can find out the donors through the unique numbers of electoral bonds that are given by the SBI, as it is the issuer of the bonds and has all the details about the donors.

TMC said that as the donors have submitted their KYC documents, address and other papers to the bank and SBI has all the necessary information.

(With PTI inputs)