Paying a third party is just as illegal. However, unless you’re expecting to run for Congress, nobody is going to care that you bribed some low level foreign customs agent to get your ink cartridges released.
Grease payments are paid for the purpose of expediting a task that a low-level official is required to do anyway as part of their job, e.g. release a package from customs hell.
The FCPA prohibits bribes which are payments intended to influence high-level decision-makers to make a decision in your favor when they are not otherwise required to do so.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Ac...
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One of the major scandals associated with the Dole family is the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. Sanford Ballard Dole used his government influence and self-appointed position in Hawaii to push the US toward taking over the islands in the late 1890s. The Dole fruit company in Hawaii rose out of the bloodless Hawaiian coup staged by the Dole and the US government in 1893. Another scandal involved the Dole Food Company, where a jury found that Dole should pay $2.5 million in punitive damages to five workers who claimed they were made sterile by use of a pesticide on Nicaraguan banana plantations in the 1970s.
Maybe if you are doing more serious stuff like business or real estate it makes sense.
Most of the time when you need to deal with a government agency you’d go through one of them. They don’t advertise that they’ll bribe people to get it done but that’s how it works.
