The petition has also sought a direction to the authorities to recover the money donated by companies as part of “quid pro quo arrangements where these are found to be proceeds of crime”.A five-judge Constitution bench had on February 15 scrapped the electoral bonds scheme of anonymous political funding introduced by the BJP government.Following the top court’s judgement, the State Bank of India, the authorised financial institution under the scheme, had shared the data with the EC, which later made it public.The electoral bonds scheme, which was notified by the government on January 2, 2018, was pitched as an alternative to cash donations made to political parties as part of its efforts to bring in transparency in political funding.”The electoral bond scam has a money trail unlike the 2G scam or the coal scam, where allocations of spectrum and coal mining leases were arbitrarily made, but there was no evidence of a money trail. Yet this court ordered court-monitored investigations in both those cases, appointed special public prosecutors and formed special courts to deal with those cases,” the plea said.It claimed that several firms which were under investigation by these agencies have donated large sums of money to the ruling party, to potentially influence the outcome of probes.
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