The payments made to the personal attorney of President Donald Trump raise questions as to whether these companies violated anti-bribery rules, experts in federal bribery laws say.

The lawyer for the adult film star suing the president revealed that three companies, AT&T, Switzerland’s Novartis and Korea Aerospace Industries, made payments to Michael Cohen. Each company has confirmed the payments that the lawyer, Michael Avenatti, disclosed — AT&T T, -2.21% said its $200,000 was for insights into understanding the new administration, Korea Aerospace said its $150,000 was for legal insights on U.S. accounting standards and Novartis NVS, -1.65% said it paid $1.2 million for insights onto Trump’s stance on health policy.

Read:Novartis paid Cohen $1.2 million to consult on ‘certain U.S. healthcare policy matters’

Cohen’s limited liability company that accepted the payments, Essential Consultants, is the same one that sent $130,000 to Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who alleged she had an affair with the president before he took office.

Foreign companies that made payments could be in serious trouble back home, said one expert in the U.S. and international global laws that are supposed to deter bribery of government officials and influence peddling.

Matt Kelly, editor of Radical Compliance, a blog that follows corporate governance, compliance, and ethics issues, said: “The Trump Administration is a foreign government to foreign corporations — so some Ministry of Justice overseas could view this as one of their country’s businesses trying to curry favor with a foreign official (President Trump) by paying huge fees to his ex-lawyer and fixer. That is certainly how the U.S. Justice Department would view things if AT&T had done something similar overseas— say, giving a consulting contract to the ex-counsel of a prime minister. It would certainly warrant investigation as a criminal violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”

The Swiss Criminal Code makes bribery of foreign public officials a criminal offense. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently praised Swiss officials for expanding the number of cases it’s investigating. There’s been a nearly six-fold increase in money laundering and bribery probes from 2011 to 2016 according to a CNBC report.

South Korea is a signatory to the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention enacted in 1998 which makes bribery of foreign public officials in international business transactions a criminal act. Its own law, the Foreign Bribery Prevention in International Business Transactions Act, says it’s bribery when any Korean national intentionally promises, gives or offers a bribe to a foreign public official in connection with the performance of his official duties in order to obtain an improper advantage in an international business transaction.

“If AT&T or any other corporation wanted to gain influence with the new Trump administration,” Kelly added, “they could have held an event at the DC Trump Hotel or donated to his inauguration committee, like so many others did.”

That is in fact what many have done. Data from the Federal Election Committee show $106.8 million was poured into the inauguration committee. Donald J. Trump for President Inc. has already raised over $13 million in the last two years and ended March with $28 million in cash, FEC data show.

“Giving exorbitant consultant contracts to the president’s fixer is a singularly bad way to do it,” Kelly continued. “These companies should have a bulletproof explanation of why they did what they did. Right now, it doesn’t pass the smell test at all.”

Attorney Phillip Urofsky, a former DOJ prosecutor who focuses on the cases involving the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, said there’s a difference between influence peddling and bribery. “In the absence of allegations that Cohen, or his companies, were conduit to payments to government officials, then it would be difficult to construct a bribery case based on payments to friends, lawyers, or cronies of such government officials,” Urofsky said.

“In the U.S., the DOJ has stretched the FCPA to include payments to family members to win favor with government officials even in the absence of a tangible benefit being conveyed to the government official, but it is not clear whether foreign enforcement authorities would similarly apply their versions of the FCPA to such a fact pattern,” said Urofsky.

“To be clear,” Urofsky added, “I’m not saying there is no case. If payments were made after the election, knowing that the Cohen company was paying women to be silent to protect the president, that might be viewed as intended to provide a benefit to a government official, namely the president. Of course, there also has to be evidence of a benefit flowing the other way – some evidence that the foreign company sought an advantage from the president or the administration in return.”

Sara Kropf, a white collar criminal defense attorney based in Washington, D.C., is not so sure. “A payment in return for a meeting or to learn information about President Trump is not a crime. Plus, any payments from companies to Michael Cohen are one step removed from a direct payment to a government official, making liability for the companies even less likely. If this were illegal, then a lot of lobbyists better get lawyered up,” Kropf said.

Michael Volkov, an attorney who focuses on FCPA and corruption cases, said, “AT&T, Novartis and Korean Airlines face exposure if Michael Cohen was selling ‘official acts’ by Trump Administration officials in exchange for cash. Cohen would be liable and so would any person in the government who was agreeing to and/or providing official, government conduct promised to the payor. To the extent that Cohen’s conduct borders on selling official acts, at Trump’s direction or knowledge, then Trump and Cohen would be liable. If, on the other hand, the companies were hiring Cohen as a lobbyist for which he lobbied government officials on policy issues, then his only exposure would be for failing to register as a lobbyist.”

At the time of the payment, AT&T was seeking government approval for its still pending acquisition of Time Warner US:TWX . The telecom firm said Cohen’s consulting firm did no legal or lobbying work for the company. AT&T said its contract with Cohen ended in December 2017.

AT&T was also positively impacted by a regulatory change that occurred in the same timeframe regarding net neutrality. The Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal net neutrality in December 2017.

A Korea Aerospace Industries spokeswoman told The Washington Post that it was unaware of Essential Consultants’ connection to Trump. The company said it paid Cohen’s firm “to inform reorganization of our internal accounting system.” Korea Aerospace is pursuing a U.S. Air Force contract worth up to $16.3 billion to provide aircraft for the Advanced Pilot Training project in a joint bid with Lockheed Martin LMT, -1.30% .

NBC News reported Special Counsel Robert Mueller had already questioned Novartis about the payments in November. NBC News also said that it had reviewed financial documents that “appear to support Avenatti’s account of the transactions.”