In a lawsuit filed in Delaware and made public Friday, Raj Sports, which owns two professional sports teams in Portland, argues that as bids were being formalized to purchase the Rose City’s most valuable team, an involved family misled them in violation of a legal agreement.

The owner of the Portland Trail Blazers, the Allen Estate, accepted a bid from an ownership group led by Tom Dundon, the owner of the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes. The Cherng family was announced as part of Dundon’s ownership group when that bid was formally accepted earlier this month.

But according to a lawsuit from Raj Sports Holdings, LLC, the Cherngs were initially part of a separate ownership group led by Raj Sports.

Raj Sports, the sports investment firm owned by Alex Bhathal and Lisa Bhathal Merage, manages the Portland Thorns soccer team and the city’s WNBA team, the Portland Fire.

According to the lawsuit, the Bhathal family was interested in acquiring the Blazers as a third team in Portland, saying, “Given the natural appeal and synergies of united ownership of Portland’s NBA and WNBA franchises and of holding three different professional athletic franchises in a single city, [Raj Sports] immediately started preparing a bid for the Trail Blazers franchise after the Allen Estate’s announcement.”

The Cherng family, the lawsuit said, was among an initial group of “friends and family” that Raj Sports put together to create a bid.

“​​The Cherngs were eager to participate in Plaintiff’s bid, and, at their direction, the Cherng Family Trust was set to be the largest investor in Plaintiff’s investor group other than the Plaintiff,” the lawsuit reads.

The Raj Sports lawsuit goes on to say that the Bhathals and their representatives met with the Cherng family, and shared proprietary information about their research and potential plans for the Trail Blazers. The partnership appeared to be further cemented by a decision communicated to Raj Sports, according to the lawsuit, that on Aug. 22, the Cherng’s investment council “signed off” on joining the Raj Sports bid.

The joint effort between Raj Sports and the Cherng family started to unravel a few days later, according to the lawsuit. A two-and-a-half-hour meeting on Aug. 27 was followed by emails from Cherng representatives expressing “they were surprised with the pushback on various of the issues, and were expecting more flexibility.”

The lawsuit says that later that night Raj Sports received what it described as a “pencils down” message. The lawsuit says the next day that representatives of the two families, Alex Bhathal and Andrew Cherng, spoke, with Cherng telling Bhathal “unequivocally” that the Cherngs were not in discussions with Dundon’s team about joining that group.

These conversations were taking place roughly two weeks after Dundon’s group had reached a tentative agreement with the Allen Estate to buy the team. The Cherngs were not mentioned as being involved in that bid in news reports at the time.

As recently as Sept. 5, the Raj Sports lawsuit says, the Cherngs remained actively engaged, and “solicited and received in-depth updates from one of Plaintiff’s advisors on deal dynamics and tactics through multiple calls and written communications.”

A week later, the Allen Estate officially accepted the Dundon team’s offer and the participation of the Cherngs as members of that ownership group was made public.

Raj Sports in the lawsuit alleges that the Cherngs, and specifically Andrew Cherng in his phone call with Alex Bhathal, made statements that were “false and made with an intent to deceive.”

The lawsuit ultimately alleges that the way the Cherngs participated in two competing bids to buy the Trail Blazers was a breach of contract.

“As a direct result of Defendants’ breaches of the Exclusivity Agreement and intertwined tortious interference with the Exclusivity Agreement and Raj Sports’ reasonable business opportunity to acquire the Trail Blazers franchise, Raj Sports has suffered substantial losses,” the lawsuit reads.

The Raj Sports suit says its representatives informed the Allen Estate of the Cherngs’ activities, three days after the Dundon bid was publicly accepted. The complaint calls for a restraining order or injunction against the Cherngs, as well as “damages … in an amount to be proven at trial.”

An email sent to a representative of the Cherng family did not get a response right away.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/26/raj-sports-lawsuit-cherng-panda-express-portland-trail-blazers/