‘SBI is lying’: Why banking experts dispute its claims on electoral bonds data

They say it is unlikely that the bank does not digitise information on the bonds. Even if it does not, it needs a few days, not four months, to put it out.

Mar 8, 2024 - 04:00

‘SBI is lying’: Why banking experts dispute its claims on electoral bonds data

The State Bank of India on Wednesday missed the deadline set by the Supreme Court of India, directing it to hand over information about 22,217 electoral bonds to the Election Commission of India.

In a landmark decision last month, the Supreme Court had struck down as unconstitutional the Narendra Modi government’s electoral bonds scheme, which allowed individuals and corporations to make anonymous donations to political parties through these monetary instruments purchased from the State Bank of India. The Bharatiya Janata Party was the scheme’s greatest beneficiary.

On March 4, two days before the deadline was set to lapse, the SBI, India’s largest public sector bank, asked for time till June 30 – an extension of 16 weeks. It argued that it needed more time to follow through with the order as it did not keep a digital trail of the sale and redemption of bonds.

Experts in the banking sector Scroll spoke to contested the SBI’s claims that it would need four months to make the data available. “They are telling a lie, to put it crudely, and you don’t need an expert or a banker to say this,” said an analyst who has been tracking the industry for over three decades.

The sceptics have a two-fold argument: one, that...