Buddha Bar's Baby Daddy/Ownership Drama Continues

Hopefully your last few days have been better than those of the owners of Buddha Bar. You recall last Wednesday, when police swarmed the place and padlocked the door, due to problems that had something to do with it's ownership? Well, here's some more bathroom stall gossip.-

Here's an update: Page Six says a "source" explained how the club's former CEO, Jean-Yves Haouzi, was behind the police and their padlocks' presence. Haouzi is one of three people who licensed the bar's name to its current owners in 2006 for 5% of the revenue (which works out to be around $900,000). But in 2007 Haouzi was "pushed out" of the operation because he "played backgammon and sat around the club with models" all day and didn't do anything that warranted his $190,000 a year salary. He proceeded to sue the owners for the naming rights, in addition to filing a lawsuit for $10 million, citing fraud.

More recently, a state appeals court ruled in favor of Haouzi and was going to make Buddha Bar's owners change its name because it no longer has a connection to the global Buddha Bar chain. And thus, it's now Ajna.

But possibly more interesting than how Ajna came to be is when David Kay, one of Buddha's owners, showed up on Thursday to try his hand at entering, police denied him the pleasure. So will this rose by any other name smell as sweet? Haouzi doesn't seem to want it to.

[image via downbythehipster]