MISA has faced allegations of procuring and forced prostitution. In , the Supreme Court of Sweden agreed to grant political refugee status to Bivolaru in response to his claims of persecution by Romanian authorities. He was acquitted of all the other charges against him e. Young female members said they were forced to work as strippers and appear in hardcore porn films. In , he was convicted in absentia for having sex with a minor.
France executed a European Arrest Warrant for him in He completed high school in Bucharest , and joined a predecessor to the Bucharest Metro company as an unskilled labourer in He began practicing yoga at the age of 17, [ 13 ] and began to teach it at the age of He managed to obtain and read books by Paramahansa Yogananda , Sivananda Saraswati , and Ramakrishna , even though these were not readily available in Romania at the time.
During the communist regime Bivolaru was kept under observation by the Department of State Security , because he was practicing and teaching yoga, [ 14 ] [ 15 ] yoga being dissuaded in Romania and barred from public facilities in , in connection with the " Transcendental Meditation scandal". He was captured a few days afterwards, then tried on the charge of escaping from prison and sentenced to 18 months in jail. On 17 August , Bivolaru was arrested again, on the grounds that he was mentally unhinged and a menace to the general public.
Prosecutors requested he be hospitalized, which was granted two days later on 19 August by the sector 1 Tribunal of Bucharest based on a report submitted by National Institute for Legal Medicine IML. In the IML report the diagnosis was schizoid personality disorder and paranoia with obsessive-phobic elements.
Official hostility to yoga ended with the Romanian Revolution of MISA teaches a combination of yoga and tantra. The sociologist Massimo Introvigne states that the teachings derive from many religious sources, including Buddhism , Hinduism , Sufism , Tantra , and Taoism , as well as Esoteric Christianity and Western esotericism. One such element is a belief in benevolent extra-terrestrial aliens.
