Cuban Cigars And Their Asian Partners – Slave Trade, Fraud And Money Laundering. Under The Nose Of The Regulatory Agency In Gothenburg, Sweden.

12 september 2025

The regulatory agency in Gothenburg Municipality is currently investigating whether Elite Trading Scandinavia AB – previously known as Habanos Nordic AB – should be allowed to retain its tobacco license after changing board members and getting new share holders. When Cigarrvärlden investigates, we discover a web of human trafficking, international money laundering and the far reaching influence of the Chinese state. This is the story of Habanos and its mysterious share holder Chen Zhi. And a tip to Gothenburg Municipality that was never followed up.

Published: 2025-09-12, kl. 13.38

Disclaimer: Cigarrvärlden is owned and operated by Cigarrklubben CK Sverige AB, which also operates a cigar club and has a foot in both camps. To put it mildly. Divison and separation of operations and the editorial is explained under the section "Conflicts of Interest (in Swedish)". Cigarrvärlden operates under a ‘certificate of no legal impediment to publication conferring constitutional protection’ (utgivningsbevis). With this certificate, Cigarrvärlden enjoys a special legal status in Swedish law under the freedom of expression act.

Habanos is the company that had the exclusive right to distribute and market Cuban tobacco products, such as the famous cigar brands Cohiba, Montecristo and Trinidad. It was spun off from the Cuban tobacco monopoly Cubatabaco in 1994 and in 2000 half of the company was sold to the Spanish Altadis, which in 2008 was bought by the British Imperial Tobacco, now Imperial Brands. In 2020, they sold their cigar division to an initially anonymous group of investors in Southeast Asia. And this is where it gets interesting.

First and foremost, we need to be clear about what we mean when we talk loosely about Habanos as an entity and who owns it. It is actually a group of companies with a sometimes complicated corporate structure. The most relevant being the Cuban Habanos SA, which markets and distributes hand-rolled Cuban cigars globally. The other company is the Spanish Altabana SL, which owns local distributors, in full or partly, such as the Swedish Elite Trading Scandinavia AB, which is actually where this story begins, but we will get to that in due course.

.Altab

Altabana is owned in equal parts by the Cuban state through the Portuguese-registered company Vitabac LDA – the corporate structure in Cuba has not been verfied – while the other half is owned by the company ITI Cigars, followed by a chain of ownership in several levels. (See graphic, the diagram from Elite Trading Scandinavia that was submitted to Gothenburg Municipality.)

Image 1: Organigram for Elite Trading Scandinavia AB (formerly Habanos Nordic AB) from the administrative proceeding at Gothenburg Municipality with case number MKN-2025-5445.

Chen Zhi is found at the top, who we will return to – there is a lot to say! – but we also find one or more unknown owners of 43 percent of Allied Cigar Fund LP. This company is registered in the Cayman Islands, which does not allow much insight into corporate holdings. But there are clues.

One person who was quickly identified as one of the new shareholders was Alvin Chau, founder of the conglomerate Suncity Group. He was sentenced to a long prison sentence in China in 2023, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

What made Chau suspected of being involved was that Chiu King-yan, the financial director, or CFO as it is now usually called, of the Suncity group appeared on the certificate of incorporation of the Hong Kong-registered Allied Cigar Corp, which would later change its name to Asia Uni Corporation Limited, which is visible in the organigram (image 1). Suncity denied at the time that they had bought the stake in Habanos, but Chau could of course have got his hands on the shares in another way. Another name that appears when Cigarrvärlden examines the companies in Altabana's ownership structure is Ping Shun Chiu, who is linked to the Suncity group by being the managing director of a company within the group that ran a casino in Russia. In an investigation by Radio Free Asia anonymous sources also point out Chau as one of the buyers of Habanos, together with Chen Zhi.

Image 2: Chen Zhi (far left) with then-Prime Minister of Cambodia Hun Sen (third from left) and Cuban President of the National Assembly Esteban Lazo Hernández (fourth from left). Also pictured, from left to right, are Cambodian Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn, then-Minister of Health Mam Bunheng, then-Deputy Prime Minister Sry Thamarong, and career diplomat Kao Kim Hourn. (Image: Hun Sen/Facebook, September 24, 2022).

Alvin Chau aka Rice Washer-Wa And Suncity

Alvin Chau, or Chau Cheok-wa, also known as Sai Mai Wa, which literally means “rice washer-Wa” where “washing rice” is a Chinese expression for money laundering, is the man behind the Suncity Group based in Macau, which is often described as the Las Vegas of Asia. It is the only place in China where casinos are allowed – in the rest of the country, gambling and gambling are strictly prohibited except for the state lottery.

Image 3: Alvin Chau - Credd: By am730 - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW91BiMC-qc – View/save archived versions on archive.org and archive.today, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=127910415

Suncity was a so-called “junket operator” which means driving traffic to casinos. They arranged for transportation, lines of credit and VIP rooms for those with plenty of money to spend. Which is all good and well and within the bounds of the law. But Suncity also engaged in illegal gambling on the side, where they essentially ran a parallel casino with much higher stakes. Suncity also created online casinos based in the Philippines and Cambodia that targeted the Chinese market. To funnel the illicit proceedings, an underground banking network was created which would not be seen in a favorable light by the Chinese regime, which does not want to see money expatriated.

Alvin Chau began his carrer with the 14K triads under Wan Kuok-koi in the 90s, and after the latter was imprisoned in 1999 for, among other things, attempting to assassinate a chief of police with a car bomb, Chau forged his own fortune – albeit with the help of a loan from the now-imprisoned mobster – and built up Suncity’s business. In Australia, he collaborated with Crown Resorts and their casino operations, and after media allegations of Crown’s unethical working practices, mainly how they allowed their Chinese employees to break Chinese law, which exposed them to great risks, an extensive investigation was carried out by Judge Patricia Bergen, in which the collaboration with Chau – with his well-documented criminal connections – was heavily criticized.

While Chau was building his criminal empire, he was a representative in the Guangdong Regional Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a kind of advisory body that brings together the elite and cooperates with the Central United Front Department, a department within the Communist Party that, among other things, works to influence the outside world and expand China's influence - including Sweden.

In 2020, when he was suspected to be one of the new Habanos share-holders, Chau was at the height of his criminal career, but his downfall was imminent. The year before, China had already begun to crack down on money being smuggled out of the country, and Chau's extensive underground banking network soon became a target. He was arrested in 2021 and sentenced in 2023 to 18 years in prison and a staggering $3.2 billion in fines. An appeal of the verdict did not help, nor did an open letter to Xi Jinping.

Chen Zhi

Chen Zhi is the man behind the Cambodian conglomerate Prince Group, but his background is largely shrouded in mystery. On the Prince Group website, he is presented as someone who grew up in humble beginnings in Cambodja, but even that statement seams to be playing it loose with the truth. He was born on December 16, 1987 in southern China and grew up there, that much is clear. One source – albeit of dubious value if you do not accept that he started helping in the family business before the age of three – says that he was born in Shenzhen in Guangdong province, grew up in Fuzhou in Fujian province and went to Cambodia in 2011. Three years later he received Cambodian citizenship, which can be bought for around $ 250 000 and is popular among businessmen with money. It has also been popular among criminals, which has been bad publicity for the country to the extent that Cambodia stopped announcing names of those who have been granted Cambodian citizenship last year.

In 2014, Chen Zhi founded the company Xin Tian Jian Real Estate Development with two other people, one of whom was Qiu Guoxing, who would join the Prince group when it was founded in 2015. Now it was time to develop, and with Xi Jinping’s recently announced global infrastructure project “One Belt, One Road” also known as the “New Silk Road”, there was plenty of money to be made. Cambodia’s only deep-sea port in the sleepy city of Sihanoukville began to be developed, as did the airport and highways. In Sihanoukville, casinos for Chinese tourists also sprang up like mushrooms, and the Prince group made a hefty profit from building apartments, hotels and casinos. But the city also became a hub for online casino operations, money laundering and organized crime. When online casino operations were banned in Cambodia in 2019, they where replaced by scam centers where people from different countries were literally locked up and forced to carry out various types of online fraud. Anyone who performed poorly or protested was subjected to violence, torture, and sometimes murder. The Prince group has been involved in buidling at least one of these scam centers, surrounded by walls with barbed wire. The Prince group say they know nothing about what goes on behind these walls and are of the opinion that responsibility does not fall on them as merely a contractor.

While Qiu Guoxing seems to have handled much of the practical work as chairman of the board of the real estate division of the Prince group – other parts consist of financial services such as a banking, tourism business and watchmaking – Chen Zhi was able to devote himself to getting closer to political power in Cambodia. From 2017, he worked as an unpaid advisor to the Minister of the Interior Sar Kheng and in the same year he started a company together with Sar Sokha, his son. In 2020, Chen Zhi became an advisor to Prime Minister Hun Sen. In 2022, Chen Zhi accompanied Hun Sen and a delegation to Cuba to meet among others Esteban Lazo Hernández, the president of the Cuban National Assembly. When Hun Sen stepped down in 2023 and was succeeded by his son Hun Manet, the new PM inherited Chen Zhi as an advisor or, Chen Zi inherited a new PM.

As Chen Zhi’s career has steadily risen, Chinese police have been keeping an eye on the Prince Group, and legal documents reviewed by Radio Free Asia describe the group as a “notorious transnational online gambling criminal group” that has generated at least $700 million in illegal revenue. A number of low-level employees of the Prince Group have been convicted of illegal gambling and money laundering. The Prince Group maintains that these individuals were never employees. They just claimed to be so - falsely. Meanwhile, Chinese court documents show that the Jinbei Complex, a casino and related facilities built and founded by Chen Zhi and the then Interior Minister’s son, Sar Sokha, is involved in no fewer than 83 prosecutions in Chinese courts.

Chen Zhi is today one of Cambodia's richest persons – all ten of the richest are Chinese by the way – in a country that, after having sold off all its resources – land and forests – is now selling the state itself. The elite is fleecing the country while transforming it into a Chinese puppet state.

What Chen Zhi also shares with several other high-ranking figures in Cambodia's political elite is that he has also procured a Cypriot citizenship. Between 2013 and 2020, he received a Cypriot passport as a thank you for investing two million dollars in the island, a business that basically shut down when Al-Jazeera revealed how Cypriot politicians were facilitating sales of EU passports to criminals.

Shady Business In The Irish Sea

Chen Zhi's fingerprints are visible in Europe in a different way, in the Isle of Man. The Isle of Man is a Crown Dependency, with the British monarch as head of state but is essentially self-governing. It is relatively easy to obtain an online casino license from the Isle, but these licenses have also been used to facilitate fraud and money laundering.

Three companies registered on the island are of particular interest, Amiga Entertainment Ltd, Ableton Prestige Global Ltd and Aperia (IoM) Ltd. They are owned through a holding company called Abundance Ltd, in turn owned by Chen Zhi and his wife Li Caiyun. The CEO of Amiga Entertainment was until recently Chen Xiuling, who also heads Prince Real Estate in Taiwan. An investigation by Radio Free Asia revealed how Amiga Entertainment was used to launder money by issuing false documents for games to be used by Chinese companies in China to basically funnel funds. Had the games actually been real and taken place they would have been highly illegal in China, so as scams go, there are better options.

Either way, the service of false documents generated revenue for Amiga Entertainment, and the proceeds ended up in the pockets of Chen Zhi and his wife. The investigation did not lead to any immediate action by the Isle of Man authorities. But a year later, something happened.

On March 7 this year the island´s government announced it was time to play hard ball in order to tackle the Southeast Asian organised crime, and just a week later, police raided the three companies owned by Abundance Ltd in what the authorities described as part of an investigation into large-scale international money laundering. Two people were arrested and several Chinese employees had their visas revoked. A decision was made to compulsory liquidate the companies. The Isle of Man Police cannot comment on the case but confirms to Cigarrvärlden that the investigation is ongoing.

Links to the Chinese state

Chinese companies are expected to share information with the ruling Communist Party, and party organizations are represented in all large, and sometimes even small, companies. For the Prince Group, it is of course different because it – although founded and owned by Chinese – is officially a Cambodian business group. This also means that they have had an easier time establishing themselves in Taiwan than if the company had been Chinese-owned. And there are traces that connect Chen Zhi, the Prince Group and the Chinese regime. We start in the small island nation of Palau.

The island state of Palau in the Pacific Ocean, east of the Philippines, is one of the world's smallest states and has only seventeen thousand inhabitants. During World War II, it was the scene of bitter battles between American and Japanese troops. Even today, the archipelago is a battlefield, albeit not as open. There is an ongoing battle between the United States and China . The United States, which administered the island from the end of World War II until the island nation's independence in 1994, has several military facilities on the islands in the form of airfields and radar facilities, among other things. This has aroused Chinese interest and there are well-established connections between Palauan politicians and Chinese who are in turn linked to the Central Department of the United Front, with which we have previously seen that Alvin Chau was also associated. Chau's old boss within the 14K triad, Wan Kuok-koi, also visited the island in 2019 with the aim of renting land – which, by the way, is right next to an American radar facility – to open a casino. He met with then-President Remengesau for this purpose. The US Treasury Department decided in 2020 to put Wan Kuok-koi on a sanctions list , writing, among other things, that he – like Alvin Chau until his arrest – was a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. Jason Tower at the US Institute for Peace told German DW that Wan Kuok-koi often describes himself as someone who used to fight for the cartels, and that he now fights for the Chinese Communist Party . Wan Kuok-koi also started the Cambodian branch of the Hongmen network, a criminal network that exists in many countries and is considered to have close ties to the Chinese state .

The person who arranged the meeting between Wan Kuok-koi and the president was a Chinese woman named Rose Wang , also known as Wang Guodan. She also represents the Palau-based company Grand Legend International Asset Management Group, which is 37.5 percent owned by Chen Zhi. The company, which according to registration documents The Washington Post has reviewed is described as a subsidiary of Prince Real Estate Group, which has a 99-year lease on the uninhabited island of Ngerbelas, which is located near a key US radar facility. Jarod Baker, founder of the think tank Pacific Economics, tells Radio Free Asia that the fact that Chen Zhi is listed on registration documents alongside Rose Wang suggests that the Chinese state is using him for strategic purposes. Informants to the Asia Times also see a possible connection between Chen Zhi and the Central Department of the United Front.

But the connection between Chen Zhi and the Prince group is not limited to geopolitical battles in Palau. Last year, a defected Chinese agent known only as Eric appeared in Australian media and told about one of his missions, to lure satirist Wang Liming, also known as Rebell Pepper, into a trap. The cartoonist was living in Japan at the time, in 2016, and Chinese security police wanted to get him to Cambodia to get their hands on him. Eric got a fake job at Prince Real Estate Group and contacted Rebell Pepper to offer him a job. The first task was to design a logo, which the cartoonist – who was short of money – gladly did. The design was supplied and used by Prince Real Estate Group in connection with events, and the top management – Chen Zhi’s old stablemate Qiu Guoxing was one of them – had their photos taken in front of a large, blown-up version of the design. The next step was to offer the cartoonist a permanent position, but that required a tête-à-tête in Cambodia. Rebell Pepper tells ABC News that he was enticed by the offer and considered accepting but his wife advised against it. He never went to Phnom Penh and now lives in the United States. The Prince group has denied any involvement.

In this context, it may also be worth taking a look at another person who certainly has nothing to do with the purchase of Habanos, but whose career has some similarities to Chen Zhi's. This is She Zhijiang - also known by a number of aliases. She Zhijiang was born in China, but after being convicted in absentia in 2014 for having conducted illegal gambling activities targeting Chinese citizens from the Philippines, he has mostly stayed in other countries in Southeast Asia. He was probably mainly in the Philippines from 2014 to 2017 , and it was also here, according to him , that he was recruited as a spy for China in 2016 in exchange for the conviction against him being dropped. In 2017, like Chen Zhi, he bought citizenship in Cambodia and built the company Yatai International Holdings Group, registered in Hong Kong, which soon began construction of Yatai New City in Shwe Kokko, Myanmar, a city that would soon be filled with casinos and scam centers populated by deceived people who soon found themselves deprived of their freedom. She Zhijiang ruled as sole emperor on the throne. A few years later, however, something went sour between Zhijiang and the Chinese state – descriptions of what happened differ – and in 2021 he was lured to a dinner in Thailand where he was arrested. He is currently in a Thai prison awaiting extradition to China, something he opposes as he has Cambodian citizenship.

Habanos in Sweden

In Sweden, Habanos cigars are distributed by Elite Trading Scandinavia AB, which also distributes to the rest of the Nordic region and the Baltic countries.

The name is new, until the beginning of the summer the company was called Habanos Nordic AB and has made a steadily increasing profit in recent years according to a Di article. The yearly turnover is about $ 10 million which is 35% of the total market cap.

It is wholly owned by Altabana SL, which as we have seen earlier is owned in equal parts by the Cuban state and Asian investors. Elite Trading Scandinavia is thus owned 28.5 percent by Chen Zhi and 21.5 percent by one or more unknown investors. The information that Chen Zhi was the beneficial owner appeared in documents submitted to the Swedish Companies Registration Office in 2023 by the then Habanos Nordic, and in 2024 a tip was received by the Municipality of Gothenburg regarding the changed ownership structure, something that Habanos Nordic itself failed to report to the municipality. However, the tip was not noticed until May of this year when one of Cigarrvärlden's journalists contacted the Municipalty of Gothenburg poking around regarding to Chen Zhi.

The case is ongoing at this time. The purpose of the municipalty supervision of owners and board memebers is to clarify where all owners' money, on all levels, originates. If the municipality suspects money laundering, delayed tax payments, unexplaineble loans, criminal records and other such things, the tobacco license can be revoked with reference to the owners' broad suitability (which is a Swedish legal term). No tobacco license means no sales, not at all. No whole sale or retail. Tobacco is heavier regulated than alcohol in Sweden. Opening a shooting range has less requirements to give an example.

According to the Cuban Communist party online newspaper Granma, the Cuban ownership in the Swedish entity meant that Swedbank and SEB threw out Habanos Nordic as customers in 2023. Due to bank secrecy, this could not be confirmed, but when asked in general terms, Swedbank replied that if a company was owned by the Cuban state, this would be “outside their risk appetite”.

There have been changes in the company in 2025. In February, long-time CEO and board member Stephan Praetorius left his position, although he continues to represent the company with a power of attorney from the board. The board currently consists of Jorge Sandalio Perez Martell, Rodrigo Gonzáles Jiménez and one Anders Worsøe. The first two are high-ranking figures within Habanos SA and the third is a Danish lawyer. In addition, a Swedish citizen residing in Sweden has been given the role of special recipient. Interestingly, the Habanos website mentions another person in the role of "commercial manager" for Elite Trading Scandinavia. This person is Cuban who moved to his current address in Gothenburg after previously being registered at Elite Trading Scandinavia's company address.

These board shake-ups meant that the Gothenburg Municipality initiated a routine regulatory case to see if the company could retain its tobacco permit under the current managment and owners. Chen Zhi suddenly became interesting as he is listed as a beneficial owner with the Swedish Companies Registration Office and can therefore be considered a PSI, a person with significant influence, which is why an assessment needs to be made of his broad suitability before the tobacco license can be retained. Elite Trading Scandinavia is according to the communication with the municipality of the opinion that Chen Zhi has no direct influence over the business and should therefore not be considered a PSI. Regardless of where the municipality lands on this issue, Elite Trading Scandinavia, through its parent company, has made an attempt to obtain an extract for Chen Zhi from the criminal record in Cambodia, but this only resulted in a letter – not from any Cambodian authority but from a representative of Allied Cigar Fund LP, the company in the tax haven Cayman Islands that is majority-owned by Chen Zhi – which said that it was impossible to obtain a criminal record extract, citing partly that the requested extract contains sensitive personal information, and partly that it would take too long. Instead, what was said to be the result of a search in Dow Jones Financial Crime Search was attached, which only shows that Chen Zhi does not generate any hits as long as the search is limited to Cambodia.

Elite Trading Scandinavia is, however, in the process of erasing the connection to Asian crime syndicates, human trafficking and online fraud through an arrangement. Former CEO Stephan Praetorius has revived his old dormant company named The Premium Company Nordic AB, fully owned by himself, which has obtained a tobacco license for both wholesale and retail. The new company will take over distribution from Elite Trading Scandinavia, but will buy the goods from them as they are still responsible for the imports. The new company will be located in the same premises – for which no rent is paid – and will eventually also take over the old staff. Perhaps the most striking thing about this arrangement is that it makes The Premium Company Nordic the only Habanos distributor in the world that is not owned at least 50 percent by Habanos via Altabana SL

Footnote: Cigarrvärlden has tried to contact Stephan Praetorius.

Edits/updates in order, by date/time:

The editorial team.

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