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.