The Adventures of Ro_ki

More than seven years after his death, Yogi Bhajan's widow and his younger female assistants disagree over how to divide his multimillion-dollar estate — which now includes the trademark rights to Yogi Tea.

Less than a year before his death in 2004, Yogi Bhajan, founder of a religious community near Española, signed a codicil to his 1987 will that called for a portion of his estate to go to a living trust to support 15 of his assistants.

His widow, Inderjit Kaur Puri, also known as Bibiji, did not immediately move to open a probate on his estate or to challenge the codicil assigning at least $4 million to the trust.

But in October 2007, the three trustees of the living trust sued Puri, claiming she was delaying distribution of funds to the trust by claiming she knew nothing about it.

In a counterclaim, Puri asked that the trustees be removed because, as three of the 15 assistants benefiting from the trust, they are in breach of their fiduciary duties.

Noting that Yogi Bhajan was suffering from physical and mental ailments at the time the codicil was signed, the counterclaim says the "assistants to Yogi Bhajan signed his name to the documents."

In April 2009, state District Judge James Hall dismissed the trustees' complaint but left the counterclaim intact. Hall retired at the end of 2009, and the case was transferred to District Judge Sarah Singleton, who waited until Nov. 7 to hold her first meeting on the case. She set a trial date for March 19.

Neither the trustees' lawyer, J. Katherine Girard, nor the trustees themselves, Sopurkh Kaur Khalsa, Shakti Parwha Kaur Khalsa and Ek Ong Kar Kaur Khalsa, have been available for comment.

Puri's attorney, Surjit Soni of Pasadena, Calif., agreed that the former assistants are due income from the trust. But he said that because Yogi Bhajan had handled his family's financial affairs, "like most guys tend to do," Puri was unaware of his donations to the living trust.

Soni, who is also Puri's nephew, said he is asking the judge to apply community-property rules to the case, so that the "marital estate" is divided in half and payments to the 15 assistants come out of Yogi Bhajan's portion, not Puri's.

Not until 2009, five years after Yogi Bhajan's death, did Puri move to open Yogi Bhajan's will to probate proceedings in state District Court in Santa Fe. Judge Barbara Vigil assigned Christopher Cullen, a Santa Fe lawyer, as the personal representative of the estate, but "gave him very specific but very limited instructions about what he could investigate and how he could investigate," Soni said.

As a result, Cullen was unable to identify all of the assets of the estate, and Vigil ordered the probate closed, "saying no other assets have been discovered," Soni said. "We disagree with that because we don't think the investigation was complete." He said he is appealing that closure.

This year, the estate became significantly more valuable because of a federal trademark case over Yogi Tea — a blend of black tea, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, ginger and peppercorns that Yogi Bhajan used to serve at his kundalini yoga classes and went on to sell at his restaurants and health-food stores.

In 2004, a Eugene, Ore., company called Golden Temple of Oregon began marketing Yogi Tea, using Yogi Bhajan's name and likeness, under an agreement with him. This continued for four years after his death, with royalties split between Puri, the assistants' trust and a religious trust. In 2008, Golden Temple quit paying royalties and using Yogi Bhajan's name and likeness, but continued to use the name Yogi Tea to begin selling another tea called just Yogi.

Puri sued, and this fall an arbiter ordered Golden Temple to cease using the trademark by Jan. 1 and pay $822,302 to Yogi Bhajan's estate, based on sales in recent years. With Yogi Tea sales of $27 million in 2009 in the United States and Europe, the Eugene Register-Guard estimated the heirs might be owed another $485,905 by the end of 2012 — plus what they might gain from selling the trademark to others.

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