Can you hire a foreign official as your agent? Is a foreign official always a foreign official for the purposes of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)? Can a person be a foreign official yet not under a contract for third party services? After all, the FCPA does not prohibit business relations with or even payments to foreign officials as there must be evidence of corrupt intent. Put another way, while such a scenario is certainly high risk under the FCPA, just because it is high risk does not mean that it cannot be accomplished. It simply means the risk management must be higher. The problem was laid out in Opinion Release 10-03.

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