The U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA) is a legislation which prohibits companies which are subject to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Committee (SEC) and their associates, workers, employees, and managers, wherever they may be in the world, from offering civil servants or receiving bribes, gifts, or any other sort of “commodity of value” from government officials with the aim of ensuring a commercial benefit.
Terms like “Facilitating payment” or “grease payment” may emerge as subtypes of bribery whilst investigating acts that are prohibited by the FCPA. Although, the exact correspondents of these terms do not exist in Turkish legal terminology. A brief examination of the term bribery within Turkish law is in place before exploring the accurate Turkish equivalents of the aforementioned concepts.
Within a more comprehensive framework, Turkish law touches upon concepts pertaining to crimes that are committed by public officials, with a special emphasis on bribery. The definition of bribery in Turkish law is as follows: the direct or indirect supply of goods offered to a public official or another individual with the aim of creating an incentive to get him or her to complete or not complete the task they are assigned to. As can be seen from this definition, while the scope of the crime of bribery is set to include the material or spiritual supply of goods, the subtypes of this concept as well as the nature, purpose, and categories of payments of bribery have not been specifically elaborated.
The payment offered to a government official with the aim of securing or speeding up the completion of a standard administrative task he or she is ordained to undertake is referred to as a “facilitating payment” or a “grease payment”. Frequent examples of this concept are payments that are offered with the goal of obtaining permits, licences or other said official documents in order to authorise an individual or institution to engage in commercial activity in a particular country, speeding up the process of the execution of official documents, or pre-emptively planning physical inspections that are enforced by the state.
The distinction between “facilitating” and “grease” payments is that while facilitating payments intend to facilitate a transaction that is carried out in the public sphere, grease payments intent to speed up transactions of a similar nature. As a result, though a 100% accurate equivalent of these terms in Turkish legal terminology does not exist, we are of the opinion that the translation of “facilitation payment” as “kolaylaştırma ödemesi” and the translation of “grease payment” as “hızlandırma ödemesi” within the framework of their context will be appropriate.
All other English-Turkish translation examples can be found in our blog posts here.