Politically Exposed Person / State-Owned Company Scrub

The U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act includes two notable exceptions in which it is permissible to provide something of value to foreign public officials: promotional payments and facilitating payments. Promotional payment exceptions make it permissible to pay the travel, lodging and incidental expenses of government officials if the travel is to attend or speak at a conference, tour a company facility, or view a product demonstration. The planned event was a combination of each of these exceptions, but the client wanted to have a clear understand as to which of its invited guests met the definition of a foreign public official, employee of a foreign government or instrumentality of a foreign government or public international organization. A WCF professional was asked to assist a global organization to review thousands of invited guests to a global conference they were hosting at their corporate headquarters to assist the company in determining which of their guest list was a government official, employee of a state-owned company or public international organization, perform a high level background investigation of any of those individuals who met the definition and also enable the client to submit those individual names for compliance review and pre-approval as required under their anti-bribery and corruption policy. This review enabled this important, annual event to proceed as planned and created a framework for it to operate within the constraints of their anti-bribery and corruption policy.