Nigerian music online streaming service iROKING has fired its chief executive officer Michael Ugwu for “gross misconduct”.

The music service alleges Ugwu launched his own digital music service that competes directly with iROKING.

This move broke iROKING’s confidentiality and non-compete clauses. Other iROKING staff have been dismissed on the grounds of misconduct as well.

iROKING, which is owned by iROKO Partners, is a West African music distribution platform, with over 35,000 tracks from 400 plus artists. The company says it also manages the YouTube channels of over 80 artists, "delivering 15 million video views on average a month, with over 130,000,000 views across its pages."

“As part of an organisation-wide restructure, we have decided to streamline the iROKING team based in Lagos, and have now redistributed a number of the core tasks across our global teams in London and New York,” the company said in a statement.