US Court Jails Ex‑NNPC Manager Paulinus Okoronkwo Over $2.1m Addax Bribe
A United States District Court has sentenced Paulinus Okoronkwo, a Nigerian‑American and former General Manager of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC, now NNPC Limited), to 87 months’ imprisonment for accepting a $2.1 million bribe from Addax Petroleum, a subsidiary of Sinopec, China’s state‑owned oil conglomerate.
Delivering judgment, District Judge John Walter ordered Okoronkwo to pay $923,824 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and to forfeit $1,039,997, representing proceeds from the sale of his California residence.
Okoronkwo was convicted in August 2025 of transactional money laundering, tax evasion, and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors established that while serving as NNPC’s upstream division general manager, he abused his office by accepting illicit payments disguised as consultancy fees to secure favourable drilling rights in Nigeria.
Evidence presented showed that Addax executives falsified records to conceal the bribe, dismissed internal whistleblowers, and misled auditors. Okoronkwo later channelled nearly $1 million of the illicit funds into a down payment for a property in Valencia, California, without declaring the income on his 2015 tax return.
In October 2025, the court granted the US government’s forfeiture application against the property located at 25340 Twin Oaks Place, Valencia, California 91381.
