Electoral Bonds: BJP Receives Rs 6,986.5 Crore, Future Gaming Emerging As Primary Donor to DMK

Future Gaming and Hotel Services, the leading buyer of electoral bonds, has contributed Rs 509 crore to the ruling party in Tamil Nadu, the DMK, through the payment mode that has since been discontinued.

As per the data released by the Election Commission on Sunday, the contributions made by Future Gaming, led by its owner Santiago Martin, dubbed the "lottery king" under scrutiny by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), constituted over 77% of the total electoral bond receipts disclosed by the DMK, amounting to Rs 656.5 crore.

Given that many political parties have not fully disclosed the identities of their donors, it remains unclear who received the remaining Rs 859 crore worth of bonds purchased by Future Gaming.

The disclosure is part of the data dump pertaining to a total of 523 recognised and non-recognised political parties made public by the EC on the Supreme Court’s orders. This was followed by another dataset published by the EC last week based on the information submitted by the State Bank of India (SBI), the sole bank authorised to sell and redeem electoral bonds.

In the recent dataset unveiled by the EC, scanned copies of disclosures submitted by political parties were included, spanning hundreds of pages.

Initially, the information provided by the SBI covered the period from April 12, 2019, until the Supreme Court's decision to scrap the bonds last month. However, the latest disclosure is derived from declarations made by different political parties in November of the previous year regarding the bonds they redeemed since the scheme's inception in early 2018. This latest release excludes the last few tranches of bonds.