Senior Advocate Prashant Bhushan told the Supreme Court today that the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) has filed a contempt petition against the State Bank of India (SBI) for willfully and deliberately disobeying the judgment passed by the Constitution Bench of the top court.
ADR moved the Supreme Court saying that SBI’s move to not furnish data on March 6 not only violated right to information of the citizens, but also wilfully undermines the authority of the apex court.
Bhushan mentioned before the bench of CJI DY Chandrachud that SBI has filed an application for extension which is likely to be listed on Monday. Meanwhile, ADR has filed a contempt petition. “We are asking that our application be also listed along with that,” he said.
The CJI then asked Bhushan to send an email to the registry once all formalities are completed. And he will pass orders on that email.
The case is likely to come up in the top court on Monday.
Earlier, this week, the SBI filed an application in the apex court seeking an extension of the deadline set for making public the details of Electoral Bonds purchased since April 12, 2019, saying that no centralised database was maintained.
The SBI moved the top court seeking time till June 30, 2024 to furnish the data on Electoral Bonds. The State Bank told the apex court that it intends to comply with the directions issued by it. However, there are certain “practical difficulties” with the decoding exercised and the timeline fixed for it.
The SBI submitted that due to the stringent measures undertaken to ensure that the identity of the donors was kept anonymous, “decoding” of the Electoral bonds and the matching of the donor to the donations made would be a complex process. It further told the court that the data related to the issuance of the bond and the data related to the redemption of the bond was kept recorded in two different silos.
