The U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA) in general, along with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Committee (SEC), are subject to companies anywhere in the world, and their subsidiaries, officers, employees, and managers when providing a commercial benefit to government officials as bribes, gifts or any other “valuable commodity”. This prohibits giving and receiving gifts in exchange for unfair and uncompetitive advantages.
When examining actions prohibited under the FCPA, concepts such as “facilitating payment” and “grease payment” may appear as subspecies of bribery payments. But the direct equivalents of these concepts are not included in Turkish legal terminology. Before moving on to the correct Turkish equivalents of these concepts, let us briefly examine the concept of bribery in Turkish law.
Turkish law deals with concepts related to crimes committed by public officials, especially the concept of bribery, with a more general framework. In Turkish law, bribery is defined as the provision of interests to a public official or another person to which he or she will offer incentives, directly or by using intermediaries, in order to do or not do the necessary work. It can be seen that the scope of bribery is covered by the supply of material or spiritual interests, and at the lower end of the concept, of providing material or spiritual interest: the nature, purpose and types of bribery payments are not defined separately.
“Facilitating payment” or “grease payment” refers to payments made to a government official in order to expedite or secure the execution of an ordinary administrative action that a government official must routinely perform. For example, payments made to obtain permits, licences, or other official documents to authorise a person or entity to trade in a particular country, to speed up the functioning of government documents, or to plan physical inspections carried out by the state in advance.
The difference between facilitating and grease payments is that facilitating payments have the purpose of facilitating a public transaction, while grease payments have the purpose of accelerating similar transactions. For this reason, although there is no direct equivalent of these concepts in Turkish legal terminology, we believe that it would be correct to translate the concept of “facilitation payment” as “facilitation payment” and the concept of “grease payment” as “acceleration payment” within the context of their context.
