United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has indicted a former staff of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) in a $ 2.1 million bribery scandal.

US Department of Justice said Paulinus Iheanacho Okoronkwo allegedly received a $2.1 million bribe while serving as an NNPC official in connection with negotiating favourable drilling rights for a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned oil company.

Okoronkwo is charged with three counts of engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity, one count of tax evasion, and one count of obstruction of justice.

He is expected to be arraigned in the United States District Court in downtown Los Angeles in the coming weeks.

According to the indictment, 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 NNPC.

How Okoronkwo received bribe

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 concerning Addax’s drilling rights in Nigeria, the indictment read.

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—with a fake address in Lagos, Nigeria was allegedly a tactic 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.

To conceal the illegal bribery scheme, United States authorities said Addax falsely characterized the $2.1 million payment as payment for legal services, lied to an auditor about the payment, and fired an executive who questioned the payment’s propriety.

“To create the false impression that the bribe payment constituted client funds, Okoronkwo allegedly received the payment in his law firm’s IOLTA,” the indictment read.

In November 2017, Okoronkwo allegedly used $983,200 of the illegally obtained funds to purchase a house in Valencia, a town in California.

In addition to money laundering, Okoronkwo is charged with tax evasion for allegedly omitting the $2.1 million bribe payment from his 2015 federal income tax return. He is also charged with obstruction of justice for allegedly lying to investigators when interviewed in June 2022.

If convicted of all charges, Okoronkwo would face a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison for each money laundering count, 10 years in federal prison for the obstruction of justice count, and five years in federal prison for the tax evasion count. (The Guardian)

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