A federal judge on May 26 lifted a court order Adidas won last year that secretly froze $75 million in bank accounts held by Kanye West’s Yeezy brand.
Judge Valerie Caproni ruled that Adidas skirted procedural requirements and “deprived” Yeezy of a fair chance to challenge the freeze on his accounts, according to Billboard.
“Petitioner launches a volley of unpersuasive arguments in an attempt to excuse its noncompliance with the plain language of the statute,” the judge wrote Friday. “Without a confirmation hearing, Yeezy was deprived of an early opportunity to have the Court consider its substantive challenges to the Petitioner’s arguments.”
The judge also said the freeze on Yeezy’s bank accounts had been “rendered null some six months ago when Adidas failed timely to move to confirm the order.”
According to unsealed documents, Adidas filed the case against Yeezy on November 11, just weeks after Adidas publicly terminated its long-standing relationship with West. Adidas believed approximately $75 million of its money was currently in Yeezy’s bank accounts, and it wanted to ensure that those funds did not disappear while the two companies litigated their business separation via private arbitration.
The termination with West over the anti-Semitic comments he made last year left Adidas with unsold Yeezy brand shoes worth 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion). On May 19, Adidas said it would start selling its stockpile of unsold Yeezy sneakers later this month, with proceeds from the sale to benefit antiracism organizations.
Photo courtesy Adidas
