Who is Mihai Stoian, the Romanian yoga teacher arrested in Georgia and wanted by French justice?

On 20 and 26 December 2024, the City Court of Tbilisi held hearings to decide whether Georgia should extradite Mihai Stoian and his wife Adina arrested in August 2024 on the Turkish-Georgian border on the basis of an Interpol arrest warrant issued on France’s request.

A few days after mid-December, I happened to be in Tbilisi for The European Times to cover the unstable political situation and the demonstrations in the country following the contested results of the parliamentary elections and the subsequent election of a new contested pro-Kremlin president by the new parliament. On this occasion, I published two articles titled “GEORGIA: Election of an ex-footballer as the new president booed by demonstrators” and “GEORGIA: Police violence in Tbilisi while President Zurabishvili calls for quick EU actions”. I also used the opportunity of being in Tbilisi to meet state and non-state actors as well as lawyers involved in the case of the Stoians and to collect some unpublished information about the couple. A member of their family was also in Tbilisi.

At the end of the second hearing taking place after my departure from Georgia, the court found that a third hearing was necessary to try to solve a crucial issue: the interpretation of the debates and the translation of printed or written court documents in Romanian, as strongly required by Mihai, his wife and their lawyers instead of the English language imposed until then by the judicial authorities.

The court considered that Mihai and his wife were sufficiently fluent in English due to their international activities but their counter-argument was that the legal and judicial language used during the proceedings and interpreted in English was foreign to him and was putting them at risk of failing to understand the implications of what they might have to accept and to sign.

The double translation of complex issues, first by the interpreter Georgian-English and second by themselves in their own language (Romanian) was de facto opening the door to inaccuracies and misunderstandings at both levels of understanding and could lead to a miscarriage of justice they would be the victims of, they argued.

The context of the arrest of Mihai Stoian and his wife

On 28 November 2023, a SWAT team of around 175 policemen wearing black masks, helmets, and bullet proof vests, simultaneously descended at 6am on eight separate houses and apartments in and around Paris but also in Nice where Romanian yoga practitioners had decided to go into spiritual retreat. The police forces were then brandishing semi-automatic rifles, shouting, making very loud noises, crashing doors and putting everything upside down.

Most of those Romanian yoga practitioners who were there had chosen to combine the pleasant with the useful in France: yoga and meditation in villas or apartments kindly and freely put at their disposal by their owners or tenants who were also mainly yoga practitioners of Romanian origin and at the same time to enjoy picturesque natural or other environments.

They were IT experts, engineers, designers, artists, medical doctors, psychologists, teachers, university and high school students, and so on.

Around 50 yoga practitioners of all ages were taken to police stations for interrogation, most of them being kept in custody for two days and sometimes more. In November 2024, I published in The European Times an article titled “Police raids on Romanian yoga centers in France, one year later”.

The November 2023 raids were not an operation against a terrorist or armed group or a drug cartel. They were raids targeting eight private places mainly used by peaceful Romanian yoga practitioners but the police suspected these places to be used under cover for illegal activities: trafficking in human beings, sexual exploitation and forcible confinement.This was the official charge against Gregorian Bivolaru, the founder of the Romanian MISA yoga group, and some others who were put in pretrial detention in France in the aftermath of the raids.

The arrest warrant against the Stoians channeled from Paris to Tbilisi through Interpol included the same charges although they were not in France at the time of the police raids or before and had never had any yoga activity in France. In the French media, they were repeatedly painted as a criminal, without any evidence, but who is Mihai Stoian?

Who is Mihai Stoian, the Romanian yoga teacher arrested in Georgia and wanted by French justice? 4

Family and social background

Mihai Stoian was born on 27 January 1969 in Bucharest in an atheistic society. It was then under the rule of Ceaucescu, the Communist President of Romania to be toppled 20 years later.

His mother, G. Stoian, was an accountant. His father, Zaharia Stoian, was born in 1938 in a peasants’ family of 11 children in the village of Comosteni, Dolj county. His father attended the Faculty of Mathematics in Bucharest in 1962 and was admitted for his doctoral thesis in 1966. Later on, he taught as a professor of mathematics at the same university as well as at the Bucharest Polytechnic University between 1962 and 2009. Due to his experience, he was proposed to teach at the Faculty of Electronics in Kinshasa (Zaire), where he stayed for two years (1974-1976).

In the 90s, after the collapse of Ceaucescu’s regime, he started practicing yoga together with his two sons, Mihai and Jan, and participated in the courses of the MISA Yoga School. At some time, he was a Hatha Yoga instructor in Ploiesti. After 14 years of practice he got retired as he had done from his teaching career in his capacity of Professor of Mathematics in various universities. 

Studies and professional activity of Mihai Stoian

In his early life Mihai Stoian studied at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, founded in 1818 and affiliated with the European Association for International Education (EAIE). He graduated in 1993 with a degree in nuclear physics and nuclear technology. 

For several years he worked as a scientific researcher at the Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence “Mihai Draganescu”, created in 1994 in the Romanian Academy of Sciences (*) founded in 1866 under the name of the Romanian Literary Society. 

Mihai Stoian received the Romanian Academy Award for his scientific activity in 2001, which included the publication of eight papers in the field of formal languages and optimization methods for interactive algorithms.

While working as a researcher he also taught “Microprocessor Fundamentals” at the Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest (1999-2002).

Mihai Stoian’s involvement in yoga

In 1989 he heard about the MISA yoga movement (Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute) and met later on Gregorian ,, the spiritual leader of MISA, who officially founded it in 1990. Before the COVID, about 30,000 practitioners were following his teachings throughout the world.

After his university graduation in 1993, he co-founded and ran Soteria Didact, a non-profit organization specialized in the production of yoga teaching material (1994-1996). After that, he co-founded and ran the Ganesha Publishing House, for the printing of alternative works on personal development (1996-2001).

In 2001 he got married in an Orthodox church with Adina, another yoga practitioner in MISA. Together, they created a counseling program and service for couples and individuals in matters related to love and intimacy.

In 2002, Mihai Stoian and his wife moved to Denmark and from 2003 he became the senior teacher of the Natha Yoga Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to personal development.

In 2006, the teaching methods of Mihai Stoian attracted the attention of ATMAN, the International Federation for Yoga and Meditation, he collaborated with from time to time. ATMAN Federation was officially registered in 2004 in the UK by teachers of yoga and personal development.

From 2009 until his arrest in Georgia in August 2024 Mihai Stoian participated in the Yoga and Personal Development Program of ATMAN Federation, providing consultation and teaching materials.

Besides yoga courses, he provided series of lectures on topics such as Science of Success, Stress Mastery, Quantum Science, Keys for Couple Relationship and Nature of Consciousness. Mihai Stoian and his wife are opposed to their extradition to France, saying they were not involved in any yoga activity there and in any illegal activity as mentioned in the Interpol arrest warrant, had nothing to do with the massive police raids on yoga centers on 28 November 2023 which led to several arrests and pretrial detention cases, and no yoga practitioner had filed a complaint against him or his wife.