The Supreme Court on Thursday assured the listing of ADR’s contempt plea against the State Bank of India (SBI) in the electoral bonds case on March 11, 2024.
In its plea, the ADR said that the application is “mala fide” and demonstrates a wilful and deliberate disobedience & defiance of the judgement passed by the Constitution Bench of the apex court.
The SC also directed lawyer Prashant Bhushan, representing NGO, to share an e-mail regarding the contempt plea. The plea filed by the lawyer mentions contempt petition in Supreme Court against SBI for not complying with its direction to disclose details of electoral bonds to ECI by March 6.
“SBI has filed an application for extension which is likely to be listed on Monday. Meanwhile, Association for Democratic Reforms has filed a contempt petition. We are asking that our application be also listed along with that,” Bhushan told CJI Chandrachud.
The SBI did not meet the March 6 deadline, set by the Supreme Court, for sharing details of the electoral bonds encashed by political parties.
The bank had on Monday moved the Supreme Court seeking an extension of time till June 30 to disclose details of each electoral bond encashed by the political parties.
In February, a five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud had struck down electoral bonds scheme and directed the SBI to disclose details of each electoral bond encashed by the political parties.
The information should include the date of encashment and the denomination of the bonds and be submitted to the poll panel by March 6, the court had ordered.
In its application before the apex court, the SBI had contended that retrieval of information from “each silo” and the procedure of matching the information of one silo to that of the other would be a time-consuming exercise.
The bench had also said that the Election Commission (EC) should publish the information shared by the SBI on its official website by March 13.
