A United States court has handed a seven-year, three-month prison sentence to a former executive of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Paulinus Okoronkwo, after he was convicted of accepting a $2.1 million bribe during his tenure with the state-owned oil company.
Okoronkwo was found guilty of leveraging his position to secure favourable drilling concessions for a subsidiary of a Chinese-owned petroleum firm. On Monday, United States District Judge John F. Walter imposed the sentence.
The 58-year-old attorney had previously forfeited a $2.5 million mansion in Los Angeles to the U.S. government in October of the previous year. In addition to his prison term, the court ordered him to pay $923,824 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and to surrender $1,039,997 — proceeds from the sale of a property linked to the laundering of the illicit funds, according to a statement issued by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Okoronkwo, who holds dual citizenship in the United States and Nigeria, once served as general manager of the upstream division at the NNPC. Earlier in January 2026, the State Bar of California suspended his licence to practise law.
Investigators revealed that in October 2015, Addax Petroleum — a Switzerland-based subsidiary of Sinopec, a Chinese state-owned oil and petrochemical conglomerate — transferred $2,105,263 into an Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Account (IOLTA) belonging to Okoronkwo’s Los Angeles law firm. The payment was purportedly for consultancy services tied to negotiations and a settlement agreement with the NNPC concerning Addax’s drilling rights in Nigeria.
However, U.S. prosecutors stated that the consultancy arrangement was a sham designed to disguise a bribe. They alleged that Addax risked losing billions of dollars if its favourable drilling terms were not preserved and therefore used a falsified engagement letter, bearing a bogus Lagos address, to conceal the true purpose of the payment. Authorities further claimed that Addax misrepresented the transfer as legitimate legal fees, misled auditors about its nature, and dismissed executives who raised concerns over the transaction.
According to the Justice Department, Okoronkwo received the funds through his firm’s IOLTA account to create the false appearance that the money constituted client trust funds. Between February 2016 and 2018, he allegedly channelled portions of the money to a company named IPO Capital LLC, subsequently using the proceeds for personal expenses, including family costs, the purchase of a vehicle, and real estate.
Prosecutors detailed that in November 2017, nearly $983,200 of the illicit funds was used as a down payment on a residence in Valencia. Additionally, Okoronkwo failed to report the $2.1 million payment on his 2015 federal income tax return. Authorities also accused him of obstructing justice in June 2022 by falsely informing federal investigators that none of the funds had been used to acquire property and insisting that the money represented client trust funds rather than income to his law firm.