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SC to consider plea for stay on electoral bond

SC to take up matter on April 10
Last Updated 05 April 2019, 11:53 IST

The Supreme Court on Friday fixed a plea for interim stay on electoral bond on April 10, as the Union government maintained that the instrument helped in checking thousand of crores of black money to going to political parties.

A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna said the matter would be taken up on considering the interim stay as advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for NGO 'Association of Democratic Reforms' submitted that the RTI query revealed that 95 % of electoral bond has gone to the ruling party, BJP.

Attorney General K K Venugopal said the counsel was making an election speech. “Instead of thousand of crores of black money going to the political parties, the electoral bond has come as a check on it,” he said.

Senior advocate Raju Ramachandran appeared for the CPI(M) another petitioner, which challenged validity of the electoral bond through the amendments into the Reserve Bank of India Act, the Representation of the People (RP) Act, the Income Tax Act, the Companies Act and the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) by the Finance Acts of 2016 and 2017

The Union government had earlier brushed aside the Election Commission's “concerns” on use of black money through electoral bonds, by calling it as a “pioneer step” in ensuring greater transparency and accountability in political funding.

In an affidavit, the government said the non-disclosure of identity of the donor is core objective of the scheme of electoral bond in order to safeguard the donor from political victimisation.

“The electoral bonds can be encashed only by an eligible political party by depositing the same in the designated bank account which means that a political party can open only one PAN India single bank account for crediting proceeds of the electoral bonds. The amount can be ascertained through the account statement,” it said.

It pointed out that the amount of cash donation limit has been reduced from Rs 20,000 to Rs 2,000, for which details of the name, PAN number etc were not maintained and constituted a major portion of the political donation.

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(Published 05 April 2019, 09:42 IST)

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