This is straight up bribery.
I know it can be comforting to simply say "all those politicians are corrupt" but doing so will only help those who are actually corrupt.
But in my home country those accusations in the article would definitely be one of the biggest political scandals of the year while in the US it's apparently not very noteworthy at all. So maybe I'm simply missing the US perspective on this.
Without checks in place of course, unlike in Europe.