The FCPA and compliance world has literally been “a-twitter” over the filing of this brief which puts squarely before a federal district court the questions of just what is an “instrumentality” of a foreign government and who is a foreign government official. One of the five major points the defense argues is that Government’s interpretation that a foreign government commercial investment in an otherwise private company leads to the “absurd” result that such an entity becomes an instrumentality of the foreign government which made the investment. The defense extrapolates that such an interpretation “would transform persons no one would consider to be foreign government employees into foreign officials.”
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