A former General Manager of the upstream division of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Paulinus Iheanacho Okoronkwo, has been sentenced to 87 months in a United States federal prison for receiving a $2.1 million bribe while serving as an officer of Nigeria’s national oil company.
Okoronkwo, 58, a dual citizen of the United States and Nigeria and a Los Angeles-area lawyer also known as “Pollie,” was sentenced by United States District Judge John Walter, according to a statement from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California.
The court also ordered him to pay $923,824 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and to forfeit $1,039,997, representing the net proceeds from the sale of a home linked to the laundering of the bribe funds.
At the end of a four-day trial, a jury in August 2025 found Okoronkwo guilty of three counts of transactional money laundering, one count of tax evasion, and one count of obstruction of justice.
Prosecutors said Okoronkwo, who previously served as an executive of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), negotiated favourable drilling rights for a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned oil company in exchange for the illicit payment.
In October 2015, Addax Petroleum, a Switzerland-based subsidiary of Sinopec, wired $2,105,263 to an Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Account (IOLTA) belonging to Okoronkwo’s Los Angeles law firm.
The payment was purportedly for consultancy services in negotiating and completing a settlement agreement with the NNPC regarding Addax’s drilling rights in Nigeria. However, prosecutors described the engagement letter — which bore a fake Lagos address — as a ruse to disguise the payment as legitimate legal fees.
According to the indictment, Addax calculated it could lose billions of dollars if it failed to secure favourable drilling terms. To conceal the bribery scheme, the company allegedly mischaracterised the payment as legal services, misled auditors, and dismissed executives who raised concerns.
To further disguise the bribe as client funds, Okoronkwo received the money through his law firm’s IOLTA account. Between February 2016 and 2018, he transferred the funds to IPO Capital LLC and used the proceeds for personal expenses, including the purchase of a vehicle and a home.
In November 2017, he used $983,200 of the illicit funds as a down payment on a house in Valencia, California, prosecutors said.
Authorities also established that Okoronkwo failed to report the $2.1 million payment on his 2015 federal income tax return. In June 2022, he obstructed justice by falsely telling federal investigators that he had not used any of the funds to purchase property and that the money represented client funds rather than income.
In January 2026, the State Bar of California suspended his law licence.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and IRS Criminal Investigation handled the probe, while the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs provided assistance. Assistant United States Attorneys Alexander B. Schwab, Nisha Chandran and Alexander Su prosecuted the case.
