The Man Who Bought Half of Habanos Now Faces a Death Sentence

In 2020, a group of investors paid $1.4 billion to acquire Imperial Brands' handmade cigar business. The deal included Tabacalera USA, Altadis U.S.A., JR Cigar, and a 50 percent stake in Habanos S.A., the joint venture that controls the worldwide distribution of Cuban cigars. One of those investors was Chen Zhi, a Chinese-born businessman who had emigrated to Cambodia and built the Prince Group, a conglomerate spanning banking, real estate, and what American prosecutors now say was a network of criminal enterprises including scam call centers, money laundering, and pig butchering fraud schemes.

Through a web of shell companies, Chen accumulated what a Swedish cigar club investigation revealed to be a 57.1 percent stake in the holding company for the non-Tabacalera USA assets. That translated into 28.55 percent of Habanos S.A., the largest single holding outside the Cuban government, which owns the other 50 percent. For a brief period, one of the most powerful figures in the global cigar trade was a man whose business empire was allegedly built on fraudulent schemes that defrauded victims worldwide.

The reckoning arrived in stages. Last fall, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York unsealed an indictment against Chen, and the Department of Justice seized 127,271 bitcoins it said were tied to him, once valued at $14.7 billion in the largest seizure in the agency's history. Other countries followed with seizures of hundreds of millions in additional assets. In January 2026, Cambodian authorities arrested Chen and turned him over to Chinese custody. On July 6, he was formally charged in China with causing intentional injury by cruel means, a charge that carries a sentence of ten years to death, along with an additional charge of copyright infringement.

The cigar companies he helped purchase are still untangling the damage. Tabacalera S.L.U., the operating company for the Habanos S.A. stake, has stated that its preference is to remove Chen from the ownership structure entirely. The Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court is overseeing the liquidation of Chen's British Virgin Islands holdings, and the restructuring firm Interpath now has employees listed on the boards of his Habanos-related companies. When the Justice Department added hundreds of Chen-linked businesses to the U.S. sanctions list, it briefly halted shipments from two cigar factories, Tabacalera de Garcia and Flor de Copan, that supply Altadis U.S.A. and JR Cigar. Those shipments resumed in May 2026 after the American and British governments issued special licenses.

No government has accused any of the cigar companies themselves of illegal activity. The factories kept making cigars. Altadis kept selling them. Habanos S.A. kept distributing Cuban product to its global network. But the ownership question remains unresolved. The man who bought his way into the most storied cigar portfolio on earth may not survive to see how the story ends. If convicted in China, the penalty could be execution. The cigars will outlast him. They always do.