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Corporate donations worth thousands of crores to political parties through now-scrapped electoral bonds may have hit the headlines, but there were also 132 such bonds of just Rs 1,000 each bought by individuals as well as corporates, including behemoth ITC Ltd.
Together, these bonds were worth Rs 1.32 lakh, accounting for a minuscule 0.0001 percent of the total value of 18,871 bonds worth Rs 12,155 crore, details of which have been made public by the Election Commission of India.
On the other hand, as many as 11,671 bonds of the highest Rs 1 crore denomination were purchased in nearly a four-year period beginning April 12, 2019, and they accounted for a whopping 96 percent of the overall value of all such bonds bought for making donations to various political parties.
While mostly corporates, including established names and little-known ones, went for the top-denomination bonds, there were also several individuals who bought multiple such bonds.
These also included big industrialists such as Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Rahul Bhatia, as also common-sounding names like Saurabh Gupta, Unnikrishnan K, Raju Kumar Sharma, Tavinder Singh Kohli, Rahul Jagannath Joshi, Kanwar Lal Patni, Raunak Gupta, Anita Hemant Shah, Ashok Kumar Modi and Avinash Modi.
The data also showed people and corporates buying bonds of several denominations, the lowest of Rs 1,000, the next biggest Rs 10,000, Rs 1 lakh, Rs 10 lakh and Rs 1 crore.
Those who purchased Rs 1,000 bonds included Raipur Bottling Company, Ray Constructions Ltd and Dhruv Cotton Processing Pvt Ltd, among corporate entities in addition to the behemoth ITC Ltd.
The individual buyers of the smallest value bonds included Abhijeet Soloman Kamble, Poonam Agarwal, N Ramamoorthy, Anand Agarwal, Ritesh Agarwal, Damini Nath and Sourabh Kumar Roy.
The number of Rs 10,000 bonds sold during the period stood at 220, accounting for less than 0.002 per cent of the total value and their purchasers were mostly individuals and little-known companies, along with a few big names such as ITC and Geojit Investment Services.
The number of Rs 1 lakh bonds purchased stood at 2,228 and their buyers included one person named 'Monika', the only one to go with a single name.
As many as 4,620 bonds worth Rs 10 lakh each were also purchased and these along with Rs 1 lakh bonds accounted for almost four per cent of total value of bonds.