Jay-Z may be a business, man, as his lyrics say, but his attorney, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan partner Alex Spiro, says the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has no business requesting an open-ended interview process with the rapper with no concrete limit on the artist and entrepreneur's time.

Regulators' attempts now to compel Jay-Z through a court order raise “serious questions about whether this exercise has transcended any investigative purpose and crossed over into a celebrity hunt,” Spiro stated in a filing Monday.

According to Spiro, he spent the weekend working on a solution to appease regulators by providing his client, whose given name is Shawn Carter, for questioning for a single day. In his filing Monday, Spiro said the SEC's pursuit of Carter simply made no sense, amounting to an onerous and unnecessary overreach.

At issue is the SEC's investigation into clothing brand management company Iconix's purchase of Carter's Rocawear clothing brand back in 2007 for $204 million. At the time, Iconix said Jay-Z would remain involved with the brand, namely through a number of joint ventures, according to the SEC.

In 2016, Iconix said in a financial statement that it suffered a reduction in assets and income to its Rocawear-related assets of $169 million in 2015. In the following year's filing, the company announced another $34.6 million in losses related to the Rocawear brand. The SEC says it launched an investigation in 2015 into Iconix over potential securities violations, including fraud, related to Iconix's reporting on its intangible assets, which includes Rocawear.

According to regulators, they have twice attempted to subpoena Carter—”an important witness”—as part of the investigation. They say they want to discuss the value of Rocawear and his involvement with the brand after its sale, the joint ventures he was involved in with Iconix, transactions between Carter and Iconix, and what he may have known at certain times about what was going on at Iconix based on calls, emails and meetings he may have been at. Both times, they say, he refused to appear.

In his filing Monday, Spiro said that the SEC has, in fact, subpoenaed not only Carter but numerous business affiliates of his. On Feb. 6, 2017, regulators issued seven separate document subpoenas to Carter, his Roc Nation COO Desiree Perez, and five of his businesses. Spiro noted that the SEC has been provided with almost 11,000 pages of responsive material, and that Perez herself sat for a seven-hour day of testimony before the commission.

Carter, according to Spiro, is willing to sit for an interview with regulators, but the issue is one of timing. Whereas Carter will sit for a single day, the SEC, Spiro said, “insists” Carter “commit to continuing to testify for multiple days to the extent that the SEC wants to keep questioning him.” Having rejected Carter's attempts to provide the SEC with what it needs, including other members of Carter's business team with experience dealing with Iconix, the “single issue” of open-ended testimony has become “a deal breaker,” forcing Carter to oppose the motion, Spiro said.

An SEC press officer declined to comment on the state of negotiations between the parties.

Carter currently remains ordered to appear before U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe on Tuesday to show cause why he should not be compelled to testify.