A California appellate court handed a victory to Michael Jackson ’s estate executors Wednesday, issuing a final written opinion confirming the singer’s mom Katherine Jackson had no basis to challenge a lower court’s blessing of a $600 million catalog deal with Sony. The new opinion, which essentially adopted a tentative ruling first reported by Rolling Stone last month, described the secret 2022 Sony deal as a “joint venture” that estate executors John Branca and John McClain had the right to broker while Jackson’s estate remains in probate, a court-supervised process for handling will disputes. (Details of the confidential catalog deal were first reported by Billboard and later confirmed by Rolling Stone .
) In the new 19-page opinion , the three-judge panel described the confidential deal as a transaction that involved “transferring a significant portion of the estate’s assets to a joint venture between the estate and a third party, in exchange for a large cash payment and an interest in the joint venture.” Katherine opposed the deal on the grounds that it violated the terms of her son’s will, specifically a provision that says all of the estate’s assets must be distributed to the trust naming his children and mother as beneficiaries once probate closes. In her appellate filings, Katherine argued that allowing the estate’s “single most valuable asset” to be transferred to a “new company” owned “only party by the estate” was fundamentally i.