Los Angeles-Area Lawyer Sentenced to 87 Months for Taking $2.1 Million Bribe From Sinopec Subsidiary
On February 23, 2026, Paulinus Iheanacho Okoronkwo, 58, of Rancho Cucamonga in San Bernardino County, California, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge John F. Walter to 87 months in federal prison. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California announced that Okoronkwo had taken a $2.1 million bribe from Addax Petroleum, a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned oil company Sinopec, while serving as an officer of Nigeria's state-owned oil company. The judge also ordered him to pay $923,824 in restitution to the IRS and to forfeit $1,039,997, the net proceeds of the sale of a home involved in the laundering of the bribe money.
Okoronkwo, a dual citizen of the United States and Nigeria who practiced immigration, family and personal injury law from an office in Los Angeles's Koreatown, served as general manager of the upstream division of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. (NNPC), and owed a fiduciary duty to the Nigerian government as a public official. In October 2015, Addax Petroleum, Sinopec's Switzerland-based subsidiary, wired $2,105,263 to an Interest on Lawyers' Trust Account in the name of his law firm, purportedly for his work as a consultant who negotiated a settlement over Addax's drilling rights in Nigeria; according to the indictment, Addax calculated it stood to lose billions of dollars if its favorable drilling rights were not secured. The engagement letter, bearing a fake address in Lagos, Nigeria, was a ruse to conceal that the payment was a bribe for his influence in securing more favorable terms for Addax's crude oil drilling.
After receiving the bribe, between February 2016 and 2018 Okoronkwo routed funds to a company called IPO Capital LLC and used the money for family expenses, a car and a home, including $983,200 used in November 2017 as down payments on a house in Valencia. He omitted the $2.1 million from his 2015 federal tax return and obstructed justice in June 2022 by lying to federal investigators. After a four-day trial, a jury found him guilty in August 2025 of three counts of transactional money laundering, one count of tax evasion and one count of obstruction of justice. In January 2026, the State Bar of California suspended his law license. The FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation investigated the case.
Source: 美国联邦检察官办公室加州中区
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：位于美国华盛顿的美国国税局总部大楼宪法大道入口（资料照片）。Carol M. Highsmith 摄，公共领域，经 Wikimedia Commons；联邦固定图库标准图。 / Photo: The entrance of the Internal Revenue Service headquarters building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. (file photo). Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; federal fixed-library image.
