By Omoniyi David<\/p>\n
A United States court has convicted Paulinus Okoronkwo, a Nigerian lawyer based in Los Angeles, for receiving a $2.1 million bribe from a Chinese oil company to influence crude oil drilling rights in Nigeria.<\/p>\n
Okoronkwo, 58, popularly known as \u201cPollie,\u201d was found guilty on August 29 after a four-day trial in California.<\/p>\n
He was convicted on three counts of money laundering, one count of tax evasion, and one count of obstruction of justice.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors said Okoronkwo collected the bribe in 2015 while serving as General Manager of the upstream division of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), now NNPC Ltd.<\/p>\n
The money, wired by Addax Petroleum, a Swiss subsidiary of China\u2019s state-owned Sinopec was disguised as consultancy fees and paid into a trust account under Okoronkwo\u2019s Los Angeles law firm. The court ruled the contract was a sham designed to conceal the bribe.<\/p>\n
Investigators revealed that Addax paid the money to secure more favourable financial terms for its multi-billion-dollar drilling operations in Nigeria.<\/p>\n
The company allegedly dismissed executives who raised concerns and falsified audit reports to mask the transaction.<\/p>\n
Evidence presented in court also showed that in November 2017, Okoronkwo withdrew $983,200 from the illicit funds, further implicating him in the cover-up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Omoniyi David A United States court has convicted Paulinus Okoronkwo, a Nigerian lawyer based in Los Angeles, for receiving a $2.1 million bribe from a Chinese oil company to influence crude oil drilling rights in Nigeria. Okoronkwo, 58, popularly known as \u201cPollie,\u201d was found guilty on August 29 after a four-day trial in California. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":75337,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crime"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75336"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75338,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75336\/revisions\/75338"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}