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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The fine print: Groups of individuals, NGOs can buy electoral bonds without public disclosure -Nitin Sethi

The fine print: Groups of individuals, NGOs can buy electoral bonds without public disclosure -Nitin Sethi

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published Published on Jan 5, 2018   modified Modified on Jan 5, 2018
-Scroll.in

The scheme could help entities route black money to political parties through shell companies, experts fear.

It isn’t only companies that have been allowed to make anonymous donations to political parties through electoral bonds. The fine print of the scheme announced by the Finance Ministry on Thursday also allows individuals, groups of individuals, NGOs, religious and other trusts, Hindu Undivided Family units and all other entities recognised by law to do so too, without disclosing their identities.

As a result, Indians will not be able to identify which individuals, charitable and religious trusts have even bought the electoral bonds and to whom they have made donations. This is ironic, considering that the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Feburary 2017 had announced the electoral bond plan as a way to increase transparency in political funding.

Under the scheme, entities that want to make donations to political parties can buy bonds from the State Bank of India. They can then gift them to registered political parties. The parties will then convert these bonds into money via their bank accounts.

Under Indian law, individuals, NGOs and charitable and religious trusts do not have to put their annual accounts in public domain, even though they do file returns along with their accounts to the authorities. As a consequence, only the government, its various agencies and the banks would know about these donations.

Only companies and limited liability partnerships are required to put information about their income, expenditure and their balance sheets in the public domain. But they are currently not required to specifically disclose how much money they spend on electoral bonds in a year. Even if they were to have to do so, it would not be possible to get collated information about the donations of all companies in a single place: each company’s annual filings with their balance sheets and accounts would have to be individually scanned.

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Scroll.in, 5 January, 2018, https://scroll.in/article/863782/the-fine-print-groups-of-individuals-ngos-can-buy-electoral-bonds-without-public-disclosure


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