The ADR report comes two years after AAP removed the list of its donors from the party website.
New Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has not yet submitted its audited report of earnings and expenditures to the Election Commission of India for the fiscal year 2016-17, an Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) report released Tuesday said. The deadline to submit the audit report was 31 October 2017.
The ADR report comes two years after AAP—founded in 2012 on the principle of transparency—removed the list of its donors from website. The Arvind Kejriwal-led party is not planning to put up the list anytime soon.
The party used to put the donor’s name and the amount donated on its website but pulled down the whole page in June 2016. The party leaders had first blamed technical glitches for the disappearance of the donors list from the website but eventually blamed the harassment of donors by the tax authorities. In December of the same year, Anna Hazare had criticised AAP for removing the list and asked them to make it public to maintain the transparency in funding. Yogendra Yadav, a founder member of AAP who was later expelled from the party, had challenged AAP to put the donors list online.
Senior AAP leaders declined to comment. A party leader, on the condition of anonymity, told ThePrint, “Practically it’s impossible to maintain 100 per cent transparency in political funding. No political party can afford to do it.”
A controversy had erupted in 2014 when the party received four cheques of Rs 50 lakh each but was found unsure of the authenticity of the companies which donated the money. The rebel AAP leader Kapil Mishra had claimed that the party was using shell companies to get money. Earlier, the party had a donation policy which stated that “every single rupee donated to the party will be published on the website immediately along with the details of the donor.” Even this donation policy page has been removed.
AAP is among 12 parties which have not submitted the audit report to the Election Commission as of Tuesday.