Peter Okoye told a Lagos courtroom on Monday that he personally received more than $800,000 in P-Square royalties from the French collection society SACEM over a decade and shared none of it with his elder brother, Jude. It is the first time in the long-running EFCC fraud trial against Jude Okoye that a specific dollar figure for the SACEM payments has been put on the record, under oath, by the man who received them.
The admission came during cross-examination before Justice Alexander Owoeye at the Federal High Court in Ikoyi, Lagos, as the trial of Jude Okoye and his company, Northside Music Limited, resumed after months of adjournments. Jude faces a seven-count charge brought by Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission alleging he acquired and concealed roughly ₦1.3 billion and $1 million in funds linked to the P-Square catalogue. He has pleaded not guilty, and the case is far from decided: Justice Owoeye adjourned further hearing to December 8 and 9, 2026.
What Peter actually said in court
Under questioning from Jude’s lawyer, Clement Onwuewunor (SAN), Peter confirmed he received approximately $800,000 from SACEM between 2016 and 2026, tied to ten P-Square compositions. Asked directly why he never told Jude about the payments, his answer was blunt: “No, the money was for the artists.”
He went further, telling the court that Jude “is not part of P-Square,” even while acknowledging two inconvenient facts: that it was Jude, not Peter or Paul, who signed the underlying SACEM contract on the group’s behalf, and that Jude directed some of the group’s music videos. Peter maintained the contract had been signed by “the team,” a framing his brother’s lawyers spent the session picking apart.
He also confirmed something that cuts against his own earlier public claims. Peter had previously said it took Jude more than three months to hand over backend royalty records he had requested. Under cross-examination, he conceded the request was actually made on October 16, 2022, and the records arrived six days later, on October 22. When counsel asked him to produce any text, email or document proving he had asked earlier than that, Peter said he had none and could not recall.
Why this is different from the story already told
The Okoye brothers’ fallout over the P-Square catalogue has been public for well over a year, mostly playing out through dueling Instagram videos, tell-all series and social media rebuttals. What Monday’s session did that the online back-and-forth hasn’t is put a specific, sourced number on paper in a courtroom, tested by opposing counsel rather than framed by either brother for an audience.
That distinction matters for anyone tracking how royalty money actually moves through Nigerian music’s legacy-catalogue disputes. SACEM is France’s performance and mechanical rights collection society; a Nigerian group signing directly with a foreign CMO for European royalty collection, and one family member alone controlling the distribution of that income for a decade, is a governance structure a lot of Nigerian acts with older international catalogues are still quietly running on. The court record is now the clearest public accounting of how that structure worked in P-Square’s case, even if it only covers one revenue stream out of several the brothers dispute.
What’s still just an allegation
It is worth being precise about what Monday’s hearing did and didn’t establish. Peter’s testimony is his own account, delivered as the prosecution’s witness and tested by the defense; it is not a finding of fact by the court. The EFCC’s underlying charge against Jude, that he acquired and concealed illicit funds including a ₦850 million Ikoyi property and roughly $1.019 million allegedly moved through a Bureau de Change, remains an accusation. Jude has pleaded not guilty on all seven counts, and the trial’s next sitting in December will focus on the defense’s case. Nothing in this reporting should be read as confirming guilt on either side of a matter that is, procedurally, still open.
It’s also worth noting the defense had a genuinely good day in court. Getting a prosecution witness to admit, on the record, that a prior public claim (the three-month delay) doesn’t hold up under documentary scrutiny is the kind of detail that shapes how a judge eventually weighs the rest of the testimony.
The bigger pattern for Nigerian music
P-Square’s dispute is the highest-profile version of a problem that shows up constantly in Nigerian catalogue administration: royalty streams routed through a single family member or manager, with no independent accounting layer, until a relationship breaks down. It’s the same structural gap this desk has flagged in the newer generation of artist-manager splits, just with more zeroes and a foreign collection society attached. Whether or not Jude Okoye is found to have committed a crime, the case is already a live example of why artists increasingly ask for direct royalty visibility into every territory their catalogue earns in, rather than trusting one person to relay the numbers.
The next real test comes in December. Until then, what’s on the record is this: Peter Okoye said, under oath, that $800,000 came in over a decade and none of it went to his brother. Everything else, who was entitled to what, and whether any of it was criminal, is still for the court to decide.
