(Image Credit: IMAGN)
Los Angeles, California – A Los Angeles-area attorney was convicted Thursday of accepting a multimillion-dollar bribe while serving as a senior official in Nigeria’s state-run oil industry. The case, which unfolded in a downtown federal courtroom, laid bare a scheme that tied together foreign oil interests, corporate deception, and one man’s abuse of public trust.
The defendant, 58-year-old Paulinus Iheanacho Okoronkwo—known to colleagues as “Pollie”—lived in Valencia and ran a small practice in Koreatown, handling immigration, family, and personal injury cases. But prosecutors argued that behind that modest exterior was a man who had quietly parlayed his position at Nigeria’s state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. into personal profit.
Okoronkwo once served as general manager of the upstream division of the NNPC, the government agency responsible for overseeing Nigeria’s vast oil and gas reserves. As a public official, he was supposed to safeguard Nigeria’s interests. Instead, prosecutors said, he exploited his authority to help Addax Petroleum, a Swiss subsidiary of the Chinese state-run giant Sinopec, secure lucrative drilling rights.
In October 2015, Addax wired $2.1 million into the Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Account of Okoronkwo’s Los Angeles law firm. On paper, it looked like a consulting fee for negotiating a settlement agreement. In reality, jurors concluded, it was a bribe disguised as legal work. Prosecutors described the engagement letter signed with Okoronkwo’s office—complete with a phony Lagos address—as an elaborate ruse to conceal the true nature of the deal.
The fallout inside Addax was swift. Company executives who raised questions about the suspicious payment were dismissed, while auditors were misled about its purpose. Meanwhile, Okoronkwo quietly moved the money through his law firm, using nearly $1 million as a down payment on a Valencia home in 2017.
At trial, prosecutors laid out not only the money laundering scheme but also Okoronkwo’s efforts to hide the windfall from U.S. tax authorities. He omitted the bribe from his 2015 federal tax return and later lied to federal investigators in 2022, insisting the money was client funds and not income.
The jury found him guilty of three counts of transactional money laundering, one count of tax evasion, and one count of obstruction of justice. Each money laundering charge carries a potential 10-year prison sentence, as does the obstruction charge. Tax evasion carries a maximum five-year penalty.
Okoronkwo remains free on a $50,000 bond until his sentencing, scheduled for December 1 before U.S. District Judge John F. Walter. He faces decades in federal prison if given the maximum sentence.
