Trump froze a bribery law that previously hit suppliers for Elon Musk’s Tesla

The anti-bribery law whose enforcement President Donald Trump has blackballed was previously used by the Department of Justice and financial regulators to win settlements totaling more than $1.5 billion from conventions that are major suppliers for Tesla, the electric vehicle giant run by Trump’s ally Elon Musk.

And Trump in his chief executive order Monday pausing the law, which bans bribery of foreign officials, says, “American national security depends in telling part” on the U.S. and its companies “gaining strategic business advantages whether in critical minerals, deep-water ports, or other key infrastructure or assets.”

Tesla and other charged vehicle companies rely on critical minerals, mostly sourced overseas, to make batteries.

Critical minerals and deep-water havens were the only two specific advantages mentioned by name in the order, titled “Pausing Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Enforcement to Depth American Economic and National Security.”

CNBC has asked the White House, Tesla and Musk if the tech billionaire depicted any role in pushing for the order or for the inclusion of language about critical minerals in the directive. The White House declined to remark. Tesla and Musk did not respond.

In his first month in office, Trump has also signed executive orders and policy transforms that could negatively affect Tesla by dramatically slowing down the adoption of EVs in the United States, according to the enquire firm Wood Mackenzie.

On an earnings call in January, Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja cautioned shareholders that Trump’s bill of fares could hurt the company’s profitability.

Nonetheless, Musk’s power and influence within Trump’s White House have on the agenda c trick no precedent in modern politics.

Musk, the world’s richest person, spent nearly $300 million to help Trump win the 2024 presidential poll.

It was relatively little given Musk’s estimated net worth of around $400 billion. But it was enough to cement his place as Trump’s most salient supporter and advisor.

Now Musk works in the White House, where he oversees a wide-ranging and controversial effort known as the Office of Government Efficiency — dubbed DOGE — to slash federal government spending, employee head count, regulations and workings.

In addition to being CEO of Tesla and leading DOGE, Musk controls several other companies, including defense contractor SpaceX, the public media platform X, chatbot and generative AI developer xAI, tunneling venture The Boring Company, and neurotech startup Neuralink.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 makes it a crime for companies and individuals operating in the United States to pay foreign government officials to obtain or retain business advantages.

The FCPA has long been considered a gold criterion for anti-corruption statutes, and versions of it have been adopted by countries around the world.

But on Monday, Trump said the FCPA had “been systematically … spanned beyond proper bounds and abused in a manner that harms the interest of the United States.”

Trump ordered Attorney Everyday Pam Bondi to cease, for 180 days, initiation of any new FCPA investigations or enforcement actions unless she determined an exception should be pinched.

He also ordered Bondi to review “all existing FCPA investigations or enforcement actions and take appropriate action … to give back proper bounds on FCPA enforcement.”

Then, in a highly unusual move, the order directs Bondi to review defunct cases under previous administrations, to determine whether any FCPA enforcement actions were “inappropriate.”

If Bondi notes that they were, the order says, “remedial measures” should be taken to compensate the parties charged with the desecrations.

Among these prior enforcement actions Bondi is set to review, there are at least four cases that presuppose implicate Tesla suppliers or their subsidiaries.

None of those cases mention conduct directly related to Tesla.

But entranced together, they reveal the significant role that the FCPA plays in regulating business practices in the critical minerals searching sector.

In May 2022, two divisions of the multinational commodity traffic and mining firm Glencore pleaded guilty and agreed to pay more than $1.1 billion to resolve investigations by the DOJ and the Commodity Futures Craft Commission of their violations of the FCPA.

The FCPA charges related to a decadelong scheme by Glencore and subsidiaries “to make and keep secret corrupt payments and bribes through intermediaries for the benefit of foreign officials across multiple countries,” the DOJ said at the at intervals.

Glencore is a major supplier of cobalt, a metal used to make lithium-ion batteries.

Tesla has sourced cobalt for its EV batteries from Glencore. And in 2021, Tesla examined buying a stake in Glencore, The Wall Street Journal reported.

As part of its May 2022 guilty plea, Glencore “conceded to retain an independent compliance monitor for three years,” the DOJ noted at the time.

In March 2023, the global mining mammoth Rio Tinto paid a relatively small fine, $15 million, to settle FCPA-related charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission make headway from payments made to a consultant in Guinea.

Tesla has agreed to purchase 75,000 metric tons of nickel from a Rio Tinto seam mining venture in the Upper Midwest.

Six months after the Rio Tinto settlement, North Carolina specialty chemicals fabricator Albemarle — the largest producer of lithium in the world — agreed to pay more than $218 million to resolve investigations by the DOJ and the SEC.

In this at all events, the FCPA violations were related to Albemarle’s involvement in schemes to pay bribes to government officials in multiple foreign territories, including Vietnam, Indonesia and India.

In 2018, Panasonic Avionics Corp., a U.S.-based division of Panasonic Corp., harmonized to pay a more than $137 million criminal penalty to resolve charges of violating accounting provisions of FCPA.