Germany Halts Distribution Of Cuban Cigars

A Chinese billionaire is in prison and Germany’s cigar market is paying the price. Pending sanctions and banking restrictions imposed by the European Union, 5th Avenue Products Trading GmbH, the official Habanos distributor for Germany, Austria and Poland, is no longer supplying Cuban cigars to its regional retailers. At least for now. Cigar shops were alerted by a letter sent to them last week, but 5th Avenue is not the one under investigation. The service disruption and regulatory morass stems from the indictment and arrest of Chen Zhi, founder and chairman of multi-billion-dollar conglomerate Prince Holding Group, which owns half of Habanos S.A., the worldwide distributor of Cuban cigars and owner of its many valuable trademarks, including Cohiba, Montecristo and Partagás. 

Zhi’s timeline in the cigar world started in 2020 when his company acquired a 50 percent share of Habanos S.A. through its subsidiary, Allied Cigar Corporation S.L. Five years later, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Zhi (along with sanctions from the United Kingdom), charging him in October 2025 with “wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy for directing Prince Group’s operation of forced-labor scam compounds across Cambodia.” The DOJ characterized the illicit operation as a “pig butchering scam” that “stole billions of dollars from victims in the United States and around the world.”

This Casa del Habano in Berlin, photographed in 2020, is one of many shops throughout Germany effected by 5th Avenue’s suspension of Cuban cigar deliveries.

After the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced sanctions against Zhi, the European Union followed suit, imposing restrictions of its own in July, charging Prince Holding and Zhi with “serious human rights violations, including human trafficking, torture, and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatments, in relation to the operation of scam centres in Southeast Asia.”

These sanctions brought dealings between 5th Avenue and Habanos S.A. to a standstill late last week. The complications come at a particularly precarious time where Cuban cigars are experiencing global shortages and, in some cases, exorbitantly high prices. 

It’s unclear how long retailers in the affected areas will be without any new shipments of Cuban cigars (though they are permitted to sell remaining stock). Germany in particular has become one of the world’s more important cigar markets. For 2024, the last year Habanos released market data, Habanos declared Germany its fifth largest market in the world in terms of revenue. Next week, Messe InterTabac, the largest trade show for cigars outside of the United States, begins in Dortmund, Germany.

Partagás Lusitanias like the ones shown here are among the many Cuban cigar brands caught up in 5th Avenue’s nationwide service interruption.

Zhi still personally asserts nearly 30 percent ownership of Habanos through Prince’s subsidiaries—Simply Advanced Ltd. and Allied Cigar Corporation—but the U.S. Department of the Treasury is in the midst of dismantling Prince Group, and Zhi, now 38, has been incarcerated in China and is facing the death penalty for his long list of infractions, so his future as a significant shareholder is in question.

A representative from 5th Avenue declined repeated requests to comment, but confirmed to Cigar Aficionado that a letter did indeed go out to its retailers. That representative said that the letter’s contents were a private matter and would say no more. Habanos S.A. did not respond to Cigar Aficionado inquiries by the time this story was posted.