Yes, this is Microsoft (or its employees) siphoning public funds from corrupt governments that those societies sorely need.

Those funds are lost regardless. There's no action that Microsoft or any other Western company can take that would do anything but leave them with a slightly cleaner conscience. As long as corruption is accepted those funds will never be directed towards schools, hospitals or infrastructure anyway.

It's a shitty argument, I'll grant you that, but it's not a problem that Microsoft can fix. They should take the moral high ground, but the money was always going to be siphoned of.

So the money should go to a local construction company to “build affordable houses” that will never get built or buy cheap computers with a 300% markup? Without systematically changing the culture in these countries corruption is never going to go away and no one has proved the FCPA has moved the needle anywhere.

It's gonna be tough for the West to try and use their sway over multinationals to stop this kind of behavior overseas when they can't even stop it at home. Not that they shouldn't try to do both, but there are limits to what can be achieved in this area.

It doesn't matter if the country has corruption problems on it's own, we shouldn't be party to that, and we shouldn't facilitate or encourage it by doing business with them. That's the whole point of these laws.

Why is that a given? It ultimately results in our adversaries like China or Prigozhin who are willing to pay bribes getting the resources. Or even other European countries who barely enforce these laws. So American companies are forced to be at a disadvantage and no actual bribery is prevented.

You realize that both parties in bribing are corrupt? This is not only people in middle east breaking the law, it also requires that people in the US are willing to commit fraud.

Saying it is fine when Americans bribe in foreign countries is saying it is fine if Americans are corrupt.