LOS ANGELES – A Los Angeles-area lawyer was found guilty by a jury today of receiving a $2.1 million bribe while serving as an officer of Nigeria’s state-owned oil company in connection with negotiating favorable drilling rights for a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned oil company.
Paulinus Iheanacho Okoronkwo, 58, a.k.a. “Pollie,” of Valencia, who practiced 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.
According to evidence presented at a four-day trial, Okoronkwo, who is a dual citizen of the United States and Nigeria, was a foreign official who served as the general manager of the upstream division of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. (NNPC), a state-owned company through which Nigeria’s government developed that nation’s fossil fuel and natural gas reserves, including through partnerships with foreign oil companies. In this role, Okoronkwo owed a fiduciary duty to the Nigerian government and was a public official.
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 with respect to Addax’s drilling rights in Nigeria. According to the indictment, Addax calculated that it stood to lose billions of dollars if its favorable drilling rights were not secured.
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 favorable financial terms relating to its crude oil drilling in Nigeria.
To conceal the illegal bribery scheme, Addax falsely characterized 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.
In November 2017, Okoronkwo used $983,200 of the illegally obtained funds to make a down payment on a house in Valencia.
Okoronkwo 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 when he told 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.
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 transactions 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 FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation investigated this matter. The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs provided assistance.
Assistant United States Attorneys Alexander B. Schwab, Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division, Nisha Chandran of the Major Frauds Section, and Alexander Su of the Asset Forfeiture and Recovery Section are prosecuting this case.
