Political donations were routed through non-profit trust: Aditya Birla Group

MUMBAI: The Aditya Birla group, responding to a news report that the CBI had handed to the Supreme Court a diary seized from one of its offices that listed payments to politicians, said on Friday that contributions made to political parties and independent candidates were routed through an electoral trust and these were properly accounted for in the published results of group companies.

The $40-billion conglomerate said in a statement there was nothing improper about those payments and that these were made by the ' General Electoral Trust' whose main job was to facilitate transparent funding for political parties. The trust was set up in 1998 by group firms after the Companies Act was amended to permit such contributions by corporates.

The Indian Express newspaper said on Friday that the CBI had recovered the a diary listing an estimated 1,000 payments purportedly made to politicians and MPs of several parties by a Birla company trust over a 10-year period and that the agency had detailed this recovery in its status report to the SC.

"In response to certain media reports on the Aditya Birla Group's Trust and payments to politicians/ MPs, we wish to state that the Trust was set up by some of our Group companies for making donations to political parties after the Companies Act was amended, permitting such contributions," the statement said. It said the trust was a not for profit organisation that offered contributions only to those political parties and candidates registered with the Election Commission.

All its contributions were duly accounted for and reflected in the audited published accounts of the contributing companies, it added, without giving further details. "Given that there is a pending investigation, we reiterate that it is not appropriate for us to comment," a group spokesperson said.

The group, whose chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla was named by the CBI last October in one of its coal block allocations cases, further said that the trust had several trustees, all of them "independent persons of repute", who oversaw the allocation of donations. The trustees include former Mumbai police chief JF Ribeiro, former Chairman of the Exim Bank Tarjani Vakil and GP Gupta, ex-chairman of IDBI.