Chocolate City Group

Chocolate City is a Nigerian music group founded in 2005 by the lawyers Audu Maikori, Paul Okeugo and Yahaya Maikori. It spans a record label, artist management, publishing, distribution, events and media, and is run from Lagos. Jude Abaga, who records as M.I Abaga, and Aibee Abidoye have served as executive vice presidents.

In March 2019 Warner Music Group announced a partnership under which Chocolate City artists joined Warner’s repertoire and took distribution and artist services through its independent label services arm, ADA. Reporting at the time said Warner was not taking an ownership stake. The same arrangement included convertible term loan facilities of about 1.8 million dollars.

That structure became contested. In November 2023 the Commercial Court in London ruled that Chocolate City could not prepay the loan ahead of its 2024 maturity, leaving the Warner subsidiary WEA International free either to take repayment with full interest or to convert the debt into 60 percent of the company’s equity. Whether the conversion has since happened is not established on the public record, so the current ownership split should be read as unsettled rather than as either independent or major-owned.