Suspended Southern California lawyer sentenced to over 7 years in prison for bribery

A lawyer who practiced in Los Angeles was sentenced on Monday, Feb. 23 to over seven years in prison for 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, federal prosecutors announced.

Paulinus “Pollie” Iheanacho Okoronkwo, 58, of Rancho Cucamonga, was also ordered to pay $923,824 in restitution to the IRS and to forfeit $1,039,997, the amount of the net proceeds of the sale of a home involved in the laundering of the bribe money, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.

A jury last August found Okoronkwo guilty of three counts of transactional money laundering, one count of tax evasion and one count of obstruction of justice.

Okoronkwo, a dual citizen of the United States and Nigeria, practiced immigration, family, and personal injury law out of an office in Koreatown. He was also a foreign official who served as the general manager of the upstream division of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp.

The NNPC is a state-owned company that Nigeria’s government used to develop its fossil fuel and natural gas reserves, including through partnerships with foreign oil companies. In this role, Okoronkwo was a public official and owed a fiduciary duty to the Nigerian government, prosecutors said.

In October 2015, Addax Petroleum, a Switzerland-based subsidiary of Sinopec, a Chinese state-owned petroleum, gas, and petrochemical company, wired a payment of $2,105,263 to an account in the name of Okoronkwo’s Los Angeles law firm, statedly for his work as a consultant. According to an indictment, Addax saw that it could lose billions of dollars if its preferred drilling rights were not secured.

An engagement letter that Addax signed that month with Okoronkwo’s law office, with a fake address in Lagos, Nigeria, was a front meant to hide that its payment to Okoronkwo was a bribe in exchange for his influence in securing more favorable financial agreements in relation to its crude oil drilling in Nigeria, a U.S. Attorney’s Office news release said.

In an affort to hide the scheme, Addax falsely characterized the $2.1 million payment as a payment for legal services, reportedly lied to an auditor about the payment, and fired executives who questioned the payment. Okoronkwo received the payment in a certain trust account to try to create the false impression that the bribe payment was made up of client funds.

After receiving the bribe into the trust account, Okoronkwo routed funds to a company called IPO Capital LLC from February 2016 to 2018. Then Okoronkwo used the bribery funds to pay for family expenses, a car and a home, the news release said.

Okoronkwo also ommitted the $2.1 million bribe payment from his 2015 federal income tax return. He allegedly obstructed justice in June 2022 when he allegedly lied to federal investigators when he told them he did not use any of the $2.1 million to purchase a house, and instead said the money was made up of client funds rather than income to his law office.

The State Bar of California suspended Okoronkwo’s law license in January.