Oracle has been fined USD 23 million by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for allegedly violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The company is said to have created slush funds to bribe foreign officials in United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and India.

SEC stated that Oracle India’s employees used an excessive discount scheme with a transaction with a transportation company owned by the Ministry of Railways.

In 2019, the sales employees engaged in the deal, citing competition from other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), claimed the deal would be lost without a 70 per cent discount on the software component of the deal.
Since the size of the discount was big, Oracle needed an employee based in France to approve the request. The Oracle designee approved the discount without requiring the sales employee to provide further documentary support for the request.

The Indian state-operated enterprise’s (SOE’s) publicly available procurement website indicated that Oracle India faced no competition because it had mandated using Oracle products for the project.

Founded in 1977, Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation selling database software and technology, cloud engineered systems, customer relationship management (CRM) software, enterprise performance management (EPM) software, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, human capital management (HCM) software and supply chain management (SCM) software.