The United States has fixed December 1, 2025, for the sentencing of Paulinus Iheanacho Okoronkwo, a former Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Limited (NNPCL) official, convicted of receiving a $2.1 million bribe from Swiss firm Addax Petroleum.
Okoronkwo, 58, was indicted in January 2024 by the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California on charges of money laundering, tax evasion, and obstruction of justice. Following a four-day trial, he was found guilty of three counts of transactional money laundering, one count of tax evasion, and one count of obstruction of justice.
According to the US Department of Justice, Okoronkwo received $2,105,263 in October 2015 through his law firm account from Addax Petroleum, a Switzerland-based subsidiary of Sinopec. The payment was “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.”
Investigators later uncovered that “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 favourable financial terms relating to its crude oil drilling in Nigeria.”
The DoJ statement added, “To conceal the illegal bribery scheme, Addax falsely characterised 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.”
Court filings showed that Okoronkwo used $983,200 of the funds in 2017 as a down payment on a house in Valencia, California. He also failed to declare the $2.1 million in his 2015 tax returns and “obstructed justice in June 2022 when he lied to federal investigators, telling 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.”
The DoJ further disclosed: “A Los Angeles-area lawyer was found guilty by a jury of receiving a $2.1 million bribe while serving as an officer of Nigeria’s state-owned oil company in connection with negotiating favourable drilling rights for a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned oil company. Paulinus Iheanacho Okoronkwo, 58, a.k.a. ‘Pollie,’ of Valencia, who practised 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.”
United States District Judge John F. Walter has scheduled his sentencing for December 1, where he faces up to 25 years in federal prison. “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 transaction 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 DoJ said.
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