Paulinus Iheanacho Okoronkwo, a former staff of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, has been found guilty in the United States for receiving a $2.1m bribe from a Swiss company while in service of the corporation.
He now faces sentencing on December 1 and risks up to 25 years’ imprisonment.
Recall that the US Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California had, in January 2024, indicted Okoronkwo on three counts related to “engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity, one count of tax evasion, and one count of obstruction of justice.”
The office also stated that the defendant was charged with tax evasion for allegedly omitting the $2.1m bribe payment from his 2015 federal income tax return.
In 2024, Bashir Ahmad, a former aide to the late President Muhammadu Buhari, disclosed via his X page that Paulinus Iheanacho Okoronkwo, was dismissed by the NNPC (now NNPCL) following his indictment.
“The person involved is Paulinus Iheanacho Okoronkwo, and NNPC dismissed him due to his involvement in the scandal. Before his termination, he was a general manager in the upstream department.
“On May 25, 2015, just days before President Goodluck Jonathan’s tenure ended on May 29, Okoronkwo and other NNPC officials finalised an agreement with Addax Petroleum that cost Nigeria $2.4 billion,” Ahmad wrote.
Providing an update on Tuesday, the US Department of Justice confirmed that the 58-year-old lawyer 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 DoJ statement, Okoronkwo allegedly received a payment of $2,105,263 in October 2015 from a Switzerland-based subsidiary of Sinopec, Addax Petroleum, into his law firm account.
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.”
However, investigators found 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 further alleged: “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.
It added that the defendant used $983,200 of the funds in 2017 to make a down payment on a house in Valencia, and failed to report the bribe in his 2015 tax return.
“He also 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 stated.
Okoronkwo was found guilty after a four-day trial, with sentencing now set for December 1 by United States District Judge John F. Walter.
The DoJ further confirmed: “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 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.”
