A Lagos Federal High Court Put X3M Music Under a Provisional Liquidator on 9 February 2026, Over a Debt Praiz Says the Label Has Owed Him Since 2010

On 9 February 2026, the Federal High Court sitting in Ikoyi, Lagos, granted an interlocutory order putting X3M Music Limited, the label that gave Simi and Praiz their start, under a court-appointed provisional liquidator. The order freezes the company’s bank accounts and bars its management from touching its assets while a winding-up petition runs its course. It does not say who owns anything. It does not name a sum. And it turns on a debt one artist says the label has owed him since he signed, sixteen years ago.

What a provisional liquidator actually does

The petition came from Praiz, born Praise Ugbede Adejo, the R&B singer who placed as runner-up on the first season of Project Fame West Africa and signed to X3M Music in 2010. He remained on the label until 2020. Through his lawyer, he asked the court to appoint a provisional liquidator over X3M Music’s assets, tangible and intangible, pending a full determination of whether the company should be wound up entirely, and to restrain its management from operating its accounts in the meantime.

Justice Ambrose Lewis-Allogoa granted it. The order appoints an expert as provisional liquidator with custody of the company’s traceable assets. It bars X3M Music’s management, directors, employees, agents and shareholders from operating its funds in any Nigerian financial institution, under any guise. It restrains anyone from tampering with its properties, machinery or tools of trade. And it directs that notice of the proceedings be published in national newspapers, the standard mechanism for putting a company’s other creditors on notice that its assets are now under outside control.

None of that is a finding on the merits. A provisional liquidator is a caretaker, appointed to preserve a company’s position while a court decides a bigger question, here whether X3M Music should be wound up at all. The accounts of the order read for this piece do not report any damages figure, any sum X3M Music has been ordered to pay, or any finding that Praiz is owed a specific amount. What has happened is narrower and, for the label, still serious: a court has decided the risk of X3M Music’s assets disappearing or being run down before the case is heard is real enough to justify taking them out of its own management’s hands. The matter was adjourned for further hearing, most specifically to 10 March 2026 in the fuller accounts read; a further report gives only “March 2026.” This desk found no report of what happened at or after that hearing.

A dispute with a long runway

The petition itself is reported to have been filed in June 2024, some eighteen months before the February 2026 order and four years after Praiz says his relationship with the label ended. That gap matters for how this case should be read. It is not a fresh blow-up between an artist and a label he just left. It is a claim that sat in Nigeria’s court system for the better part of two years before producing an order with teeth.

X3M Music was founded by Steve Babaeko, an advertising executive who separately built X3M Ideas into one of Nigeria’s best-known agencies from 2012 onward. The label’s marquee signing was never in doubt: it developed Simi, whose 2017 album Simisola won Album of the Year at the Headies, and whose catalogue from that period, along with 2015’s Omo Charlie Champagne, Vol. 1, is independently credited to X3M Music in MusicBrainz’s rights registry, alongside Praiz’s single “Body Hot.” Simi’s own departure was unrelated to the current case: her five-year contract expired in 2019, and both sides said publicly they had chosen not to renew, on good terms, before she launched her own label, Studio Brat. Praiz’s exit the following year is the one now in front of a judge.

What is not established

Several things a reader might reasonably want to know are not answered by any account of this order found and read for this piece. No source states the amount of the debt Praiz alleges. No source carries a suit number. No copy of the court’s written ruling was obtained; everything here rests on trade reporting of what the order says, not the order itself, which is why the source type on this record is logged accordingly and not upgraded to a filing. Neither X3M Music nor Babaeko had issued a public response as of the most recent report checked, from August 2026, more than six months after the order.

The company’s own structure is also less settled than it looks from the outside. One account describes X3M Music as a subsidiary of X3M Ideas. Babaeko’s own biographical materials describe X3M Music as a separate venture he founded, without naming a parent company. Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission has no public search API, and no manual filing search was run for this record, so the registered relationship between the two companies, and X3M Music’s current shareholding, could not be confirmed either way.

Most importantly for anyone tracking rights rather than headlines: this order says nothing about who owns any specific master recording. If X3M Music holds masters or publishing interests it acquired outright during its run with Simi and Praiz, a provisional liquidator’s custody would ordinarily extend to those assets as part of the company’s intangible property, the same way it extends to a bank account or a piece of studio equipment. But custody pending a case is not a transfer of ownership, and no source read makes any claim about specific recordings changing hands, being sold, or being reassigned to Praiz or anyone else. The MusicBrainz credits this desk checked establish what X3M Music released between 2015 and 2017; they say nothing about what the company still owns in 2026, six years after Praiz left and seven after Simi did.

What this means for artists

A debt does not need to be recent to become dangerous to a label. Praiz’s claim reportedly traces back to the start of his contract in 2010. Whatever went unpaid then did not go away when he left in 2020, and it did not go away while the petition sat in court from 2024 to 2026. If your label owes you money from years ago, the clock on collecting it is longer than it feels in the moment, and a court can still act on it long after the relationship itself is over.

A winding-up petition is a different weapon from a breach-of-contract suit. Suing for unpaid royalties asks a court to award you money. Petitioning to wind up the company asks a court to potentially end it, and a provisional liquidator is the interim step: proof that a judge thought the risk to the company’s assets was live enough to act before the main case was even decided. That is a heavier tool than most artist disputes reach for, and it signals how seriously this claim was taken at the interlocutory stage, independent of whether it ultimately succeeds.

Know what a freeze order actually freezes, and what it does not. It stops a company operating its own funds and protects its assets from being moved or run down. It is not, by itself, a verdict, a payout, or a change of ownership in anything the company holds. Anyone reporting on a case like this, including artists watching their own label’s legal troubles, should hold the two apart: a court taking custody of assets to preserve them is a different fact from a court deciding who those assets belong to.

Corporate structure is your business too. Whether the label you signed to is its own company, a subsidiary of something larger, or a personal venture of one executive, changes what happens to your masters if that company runs into exactly this kind of trouble. It is a fair question to ask before signing, and, on the evidence available here, not always an easy one to get a straight answer to after the fact.