Peter Okoye has released six instalments of a video series since 30 July, prompted by being mocked online over a remark about Nigerian languages. The content is not about ego. It concerns company registration, shareholding, bank mandates, royalty backends, and two criminal trials in separate Lagos courtrooms. Nigerians have read the P-Square collapse as an emotional event for nine years. It was always an administrative one.
Peter testified that the brothers floated Northside Entertainment Limited in the mid-2000s, all three as directors and shareholders, and that the group’s royalties went into it before the 2017 split. He later found a second entity on the Corporate Affairs Commission portal. On his evidence, Northside Music Limited was registered in 2015, with Jude’s wife Ifeoma holding 80 per cent and Jude the remaining 20. His case is that two companies with nearly the same name drew on one catalogue. Jude rejects it.
Peter petitioned the EFCC on 22 January 2024, producing two prosecutions. At the Federal High Court in Lagos, Jude and Northside Music Limited face a seven-count money laundering charge covering ₦1.38 billion, $1 million, and £34,537.59, including a Parkview Estate property valued at ₦850 million. A second case in Ikeja covers stealing royalties between 2016 and 2023. Jude has pleaded not guilty on both fronts and was held at Ikoyi Correctional Centre from February 2025 until his release in April.
The trigger was commercial. Peter testified that scrutiny began when a buyer approached the group in London about the catalogue. Answering him required the royalty backend, and that request surfaced everything else. Informal arrangements survive until an outsider demands an audit. A distribution backend is the working ledger of a career, and control of the login is control of the accounting. Asake’s move to launch Giran Republic while retaining EMPIRE only for distribution reflects a realignment under way across Afrobeats.
The shareholding compounds it. Peter told the court that Paul said Jude held 40 per cent of the group’s company while the twins held 30 each, figures he repeated in February without vouching for their accuracy. Nigerian groups of the 2000s ran on centralised management because nothing else existed, in an economy built on cash after a show, where touring still outearns streaming.
The record does not run cleanly in Peter’s favour. Jude’s rebuttal rests on documents: a June 2016 email on royalty distribution, FCMB mandates he says name all three brothers as signatories, and a catalogue request from October 2022 he says he answered within a week. He adds that Peter has missed sittings and the matter is adjourned to September. Peter, cross-examined in February, conceded he is a co-signatory to the Northside Entertainment account after telling the court Jude controlled it alone. The accounts contradict each other almost everywhere, but together they establish that neither brother could document his position in a company he part-owned.
The name itself may be unsettled. Peter says he has been served with a suit to stop him from performing P-Square songs, premised on Jude’s claim to the brand. Jude has not responded publicly. The title to one of African pop’s most valuable names may now be settled by a judge.
The structure has failed before. Qing Madi spent this year in litigation with her former label while her songs vanished from streaming platforms, showing how distribution control becomes leverage over an artist’s audience. The pioneers built on handshakes because nothing formal existed. The generation monetising global catalogues has no such defence.
Supporters report driving Peter’s streams upward, though those figures remain unverified, and Paul has aligned with Jude. This follows the pattern of Nigerian timelines converting private disputes into public trials. Six well-edited videos are not a ruling.
So, who owned P-Square? The three men who built it cannot agree, and their documents do not settle it. Nearly two decades of continental hits ran on no clear record of who controlled the name, the catalogue, or the accounts.
