&gt; get off the hook?<p>Get of the hook — for what?<p>You automatically assume corruption, I can see why. But still, (1) getting tax breaks or government help and (2) using illegal methods to get said tax breaks and government help are two different things. If you want to punish someone for getting government help, then you&#x27;re using correlation of 1 and 2, but correlation does not always imply causation. And more importantly, in case of law people generally try to determine that someone _certainly_ did something wrong instead of relying on the notion that he did it with high probability.<p>So, if you can prove that the company engineered it through illegal means — feel free to do that. But don&#x27;t forget that there are quite a lot of completely legal and ethically clean methods in lobbying. Quite often, all that company has to do to influence policy is to meet with the official and present their reasonable point of view on the issue, without any gifts, bribes or campaign contributions.