NDTV: New Delhi: Friday, June 29, 2018.
The State
Bank of India (SBI) has refused to disclose details of buyers of electoral
bonds, political parties which have redeemed these and the bank's reports sent
to the government on their sales, calling it a personal information held by it
in fiduciary capacity exempted from disclosure, an RTI response shows.
The details
provided by the bank shows that in March 2018, it sold bonds worth over Rs. 222
crore while in April the number dipped to Rs. 114.9 crore.
Mumbai saw
maximum enthusiasm among donors to purchase electoral bonds with Rs. 122 crore
of bonds being sold from the SBI main branch in the maximum city while in April
it saw sales of Rs. 53 crore, it said.
Activist
Venkatesh Nayak, who filed the RTI application, contested the response of the
SBI stating that denial of information about buyers of electoral bonds and
receiving political parties is "patently erroneous".
"The
CPIO is treating both the buyers of EBs and the political parties as being in a
"fiduciary relationship" with SBI! This is in complete violation of
the Master Circular issued by the Reserve Bank of India regarding the basis of
customer confidentiality. Para #25 of the July 2015 Master Circular," he
said.
The master
circular said the scope of the secrecy law in India has generally followed the
common law principles based on implied contract.
"The
bankers' obligation to maintain secrecy arises out of the contractual
relationship between the banker and customer, and as such no information should
be divulged to third parties except under circumstances which are well
defined," it said.
Nayak said
when the SBI is in a contractual relationship with its customers, according to
the RBI Master Circular, its CPIO cannot claim the protection of
"fiduciary" relationship which is a trust-based relationship and has
nothing to do with the banking business.
"This
position has been clearly explained by the Supreme Court of India. More
importantly, when the Finance Minister has repeatedly said that EB scheme is
'engineered' to make political party funding more transparent, then, is there
not a duty to the public to disclose?
"As the
CPIO seems to believe otherwise, it is necessary now to bring the duty of
disclosure, 'under compulsion of the law', namely through the procedures of the
RTI Act," Nayak said.
Even worse,
is the CPIO's claim that all reports sent to the government and the RBI
regarding the sale and redemption of the bonds are also covered by
"fiduciary" relationship, he said.
The
government had notified the Electoral Bond Scheme 2018 on January 2, 2018,
which allows a citizen to buy these bonds from the State Bank of India for
extending donations to political parties.
The Electoral
Bonds shall be encashed by an eligible political party only through a bank
account with the authorized bank, the government has said in a statement.
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