Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - A 58-year-old Los Angeles based Nigerian lawyer, Paulinus Iheanacho Okoronkwo, has been found guilty by a jury of receiving a $2.1 million bribe while serving as an officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Limited (NNPCL) in connection with negotiating favorable drilling rights for a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned oil company.
According to a statement released by the US Attorney's
Office in the Central District of California, Okonkwo's sentence has been fixed
for December 1, 2025 at which time he will face 25 years in federal
prison.
Okoronkwo, a.k.a. “Pollie,” of Valencia, who practiced
immigration, family, and personal injury law out of an office in Koreatown, was
found guilty of three counts of transactional money laundering, one count of
tax evasion, and one count of obstruction of justice.
“According to evidence presented at a four-day trial,
Okoronkwo, who is a dual citizen of the United States and Nigeria, was a
foreign official who served as the general manager of the upstream division of
the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. (NNPC), a state-owned company through
which Nigeria’s government developed that nation’s fossil fuel and natural gas
reserves, including through partnerships with foreign oil companies. In this
role, Okoronkwo owed a fiduciary duty to the Nigerian government and was a
public official,” the statement read.
In October 2015, Addax Petroleum, a Switzerland-based
subsidiary of Sinopec, a Chinese state-owned petroleum, gas, and petrochemical
conglomerate, wired a payment of $2,105,263 to an Interest on Lawyers’ Trust
Account (IOLTA) in the name of Okoronkwo’s Los Angeles law firm, purportedly
for his work as a consultant who negotiated and completed a settlement
agreement with the NNPC with respect to Addax’s drilling rights in
Nigeria.
According to the indictment, Addax calculated that it stood
to lose billions of dollars if its favorable drilling rights were not secured.
The engagement letter that Addax signed that month with
Okoronkwo’s law office – with a fake address in Lagos, Nigeria – was a ruse
intended to conceal the fact that its payment to Okoronkwo was a bribe in
exchange for his influence in securing more favorable financial terms relating
to its crude oil drilling in Nigeria.
To conceal the illegal bribery scheme, Addax falsely
characterized the $2.1 million payment as a payment for legal services, lied to
an auditor about the payment, and fired executives who questioned the payment’s
propriety. To create the false impression that the bribe payment constituted
client funds, Okoronkwo received the payment in his law firm’s IOLTA.
In November 2017, Okoronkwo used $983,200 of the illegally
obtained funds to make a down payment on a house in Valencia.
Okoronkwo omitted the $2.1 million bribe payment from his
2015 federal income tax return. He also obstructed justice in June 2022 when he
lied to federal investigators when he told them he did not use any of the $2.1
million to purchase a house and that the money represented client funds rather
than income to his law office.
United States District Judge John F. Walter scheduled a
December 1 sentencing hearing, at which time Okoronkwo will face a statutory
maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison for each illegal monetary
transactions count, up to 10 years in federal prison for the obstruction of
justice count, and up to five years in federal prison for the tax evasion
count. Okoronkwo is free on $50,000 bond.
The FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation investigated this
matter. The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs provided
assistance.
Assistant United States Attorneys Alexander B. Schwab,
Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division, Nisha Chandran of the Major Frauds
Section, and Alexander Su of the Asset Forfeiture and Recovery Section are
prosecuting this case.
0 Comments