A U.S. court has sentenced a former Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) chief, Paulinus Okoronkwo, to seven years and three months in prison for receiving a $2.1 million bribe while working with the government-owned oil firm.
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He was found guilty of negotiating favourable drilling rights for a subsidiary of a Chinese-owned oil company.
Mr Okoronkwo, who forfeited his $2.5 million Los Angeles mansion to the U.S. government in October last year, was sentenced on Monday by United States District Judge John F. Walter.
The 58-year-old lawyer was also ordered to pay $923,824 in restitution to the IRS and forfeit $1,039,997, proceeds from the sale of a home involved in laundering the bribe money, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Mr Okoronkwo, a dual citizen of the United States and Nigeria, served as the general manager of the upstream division of the NNPC. In January 2026, the State Bar of California suspended Okoronkwo’s law licence.
According to investigations by the DoJ, 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 regarding Addax’s drilling rights in Nigeria.
“Addax calculated that it stood to lose billions of dollars if its favourable drilling rights were not secured. The engagement letter that Addax signed that month with Okoronkwo’s law office, which listed 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 said.
It 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.”
U.S. authorities revealed that Mr Okoronkwo received the bribe in his law firm’s IOLTA to create the false impression that the payment constituted client funds.
“After receiving the bribe into his IOLTA, between February 2016 and 2018, Okoronkwo routed funds to a company called IPO Capital LLC. From there, Okoronkwo used the bribery funds to pay for family expenses, a car, and a home,” the DoJ said.
It noted, “Specifically, in November 2017, Okoronkwo used $983,200 of the illegally obtained funds to make down payments on a house in Valencia. Okoronkwo also 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, claiming 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.”
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