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India’s so-called Lottery King, who is under investigation for fraud and money laundering, has emerged as one of the biggest political donors in the country, according to data published in the wake of a landmark Supreme Court ruling.
Santiago Martin’s Future Gaming and Hotel Services bought Rs13.68bn ($165mn) worth of electoral bonds between 2019 and 2024, according to data published by the Election Commission of India late on Thursday.
Electoral bonds, one of India’s main legal forms of political contributions from 2019 until they were banned in January, allowed individuals and companies to make anonymous donations to political parties.
The Election Commission uploaded the data on donors and recipients on Thursday in response to an order by the Supreme Court, which struck down the electoral bonds scheme as unconstitutional last month. The data release has shed a rare light on India’s generally opaque funding mechanisms for political parties.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party was the largest recipient of donations under the scheme, according to the data. Several of the largest donors consisted of companies operating in heavily regulated sectors such as construction and mining.
India’s Directorate of Enforcement, which investigates financial crimes, has for several years probed Martin and his business. Last year it seized millions of dollars worth of his assets as part of an investigation into alleged money laundering involving the sale of lottery tickets in the state of Sikkim, where he ran a lottery scheme.
According to a biography on his charitable foundation’s website, Martin’s group runs a “vast marketing network of the buyers and sellers of lotteries”, including in India’s Karnataka, West Bengal, Punjab and Maharashtra states, alongside Sikkim. Martin’s group of companies also has operations in neighbouring Myanmar.
The former president of Inlott, an online lottery company in Martin’s group, founded an online payments group called GI Retail. Payments group Wirecard bought GI Retail for more than €300mn, in a highly controversial deal, its largest before it collapsed in 2020 after its long-running accounting fraud was revealed. There is no suggestion that Martin benefited from that deal.
The revelations about the political donations come just ahead of an expected announcement by the Election Commission on dates for India’s lower-house polls, due to be held by May, in which Modi is seeking to lead the BJP to re-election for a third five-year term.
The Supreme Court ordered the State Bank of India, which holds information on the bonds, to hand them over to the commission. The data was published in two separate sheets outlining donors and the parties receiving the bonds.
But the top court on Friday instructed the SBI to release yet more data that would match each donation to its recipient.
Other large donors under the scheme included Megha Engineering and Infrastructure, a Hyderabad-based construction company, mining company Vedanta and telecoms group Bharti Airtel.
Megha has also sought government approval for a $1bn project to produce electric vehicles in India’s Telangana state with China’s BYD, but the project failed to secure approval because of India’s strict controls on Chinese investment.
Civil society groups had long argued that the bonds represented a legal form of bribery, as they allowed companies and individuals to donate anonymously.
The Supreme Court last month ruled that the electoral bonds scheme violated the right to information and could lead to “quid pro quo” arrangements between donors and parties. Opposition parties argued that the bonds favoured the ruling party because it could access information on who had contributed via the SBI.
The BJP was the largest recipient of donations from electoral bonds at Rs60bn, according to the data, nearly half of the total.
The second-largest beneficiary, the West Bengal-based All India Trinamool Congress, received Rs16bn, while the Indian National Congress, the BJP’s biggest rival, received Rs14bn.
Jairam Ramesh, a Congress party spokesperson, on Friday called electoral bonds “corruption of the highest order”, saying donations amounted to “protection” money for companies under investigation.
Martin did not respond to a request for comment.
