Germany Has Run Out of Cuban Cigars. Here Is What the Board Shows.

I have been looking at the Finder’s board every morning for four months, and I have never seen a column go blank the way Germany’s did this week. On the morning of 15 September, Noblego — one of the largest online cigar shops in Germany — lists exactly one of the 43 Cuban vitolas we track as available: a box of 24 Trinidad Coloniales at €1,164. Everything else, from a single Montecristo No. 4 at €14.80 to a box of 25 Cohiba Esplendidos at €2,837, carries the same line: Momentan ausverkauft, Liefertermin unbekannt. Sold out, delivery date unknown.

Cigarmaxx, which carries the same catalogue at the same prices, shows the same 1 of 43. Cigarworld.de, the other big German name, has one of the twelve boxes we read there, a Trinidad Reyes at €408. I did not trust the scraper on this. I opened the pages myself, Montecristo No. 4, Cohiba Siglo VI, Partagás Serie D No. 4, every pack size from the box of 25 down to the single stick, and the pages say what the board says.

This is not a bad week for allocations. This is a market with no supply, and the reason is on the record.

What happened

Cuban cigars reach a German shop through one company: 5th Avenue Products Trading GmbH of Waldshut-Tiengen, the exclusive Habanos distributor for Germany, Austria and Poland. On 4 September the company told its retailers that all new orders and all shipments of Cuban cigars were suspended with immediate effect, citing a compliance and sanctions review. On 8 September Cigar Aficionado reported the halt; a company representative told them the letter’s contents were “a private matter.” On 9 September the district court in Waldshut-Tiengen ordered preliminary insolvency administration (case 4 IN 194/26) and appointed André Berbuer, a Freiburg insolvency lawyer, as preliminary administrator, with a creditors’ committee alongside him. Two things in that order matter to a smoker: retailers are expressly allowed to keep selling the stock already on their shelves, and the company’s stated aim is to resume trading. The company itself blamed “exceptional external circumstances that have significantly affected the company’s ability to operate under normal business conditions.”

The circumstances are not mysterious. 5th Avenue is 80 per cent owned by Altabana S.L., the investment vehicle of Habanos S.A., and 20 per cent by the Villiger group. Half of Habanos itself belongs, through Tabacalera S.L., to Allied Cigar Corporation, and Allied’s owner is Chen Zhi, founder of Cambodia’s Prince Holding Group; on paper that gives him an indirect stake in the German distributor of roughly 16 per cent. Chen Zhi was indicted in the United States in October 2025 for wire fraud and money-laundering conspiracy connected to forced-labour scam compounds in Cambodia, and on 30 July 2026 the European Union added Prince Group and Chen Zhi to its own sanctions list, citing serious human rights violations including human trafficking and torture. A German company whose ownership chain runs through an EU-sanctioned person cannot bank normally, and a distributor that cannot bank cannot import. Shipments stopped. Retailers were told they may sell what they have. What they have, on the evidence of the board, is very nearly nothing.

Preliminary administration is not liquidation. It is the phase in which the administrator and the creditors’ committee decide whether the business can be carried on, sold or wound up, and the company has said it intends to carry on. The same ownership chain runs to Habanos’ distributors in Belgium, the Nordics and Britain, and the trade press has named them; on our board the British shelf is still full, so whatever the banks have done there, they have not yet done what they did in Germany. Nobody has put a date on the next pallet of Montecristos crossing the German border, and I would not believe one if they did.

What is still on the shelf, and where

The board reads ten retailers in five countries four times a day. On 15 September, this is what they hold of the 52 vitolas we track:

Shop	Country	Vitolas in stock / tracked there
Noblego	Germany	1 / 43
Cigarmaxx	Germany	1 / 43
Cigarworld.de	Germany	1 / 12
EGM Cigars	Switzerland	33 / 33
CigarOne	Switzerland	9 / 50
Cigarmust (LCDH)	Switzerland	5 / 6
Turmeaus	United Kingdom	23 / 23
James J. Fox	Ireland	5 / 16
Cigarrummet	Sweden	5 / 16

Two things to read in that table. The first is that Switzerland and Britain have their own distributors, their own allocations, and, this week, boxes on the shelf. EGM Cigars in Balerna and Turmeaus in Liverpool are the deepest shelves on the board right now, and both ship to Germany. The second is that the shortage is not only German. CigarOne, a large Swiss shop, has 41 of 50 boxes sold out; Cigarrummet in Stockholm 11 of 16. Habanos allocations have been thin for years, as any tobacconist will tell you, and the German collapse has landed on top of a market that was already thin. If you are in Austria or Poland, your distributor is the same company, and your shelf will look like Germany’s.

What a box now costs a German, at the door

Here is where the Finder earns its keep, because the question is not “where is it in stock” but “what will I actually pay to have it in my humidor.” A box bought in Switzerland leaves Swiss VAT behind, then picks up EU customs duty at 26 per cent, German tobacco excise, and German VAT at 19 per cent on all of it. The board’s landed-cost column does that arithmetic from the published rates, dated and linked. These are the numbers on 15 September, Noblego’s last listed price against the cheapest live box delivered to a German address:

Vitola, box	Noblego, sold out	Cheapest live, at your door in Germany	The shortage premium
Montecristo No. 4, 25	€370	€619 · Cigarmust, CH (CHF 420)	+67%
Partagás Serie D No. 4, 25	€524	€962 · Cigarmust, CH (CHF 652.50)	+84%
Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2, 25	€500	€998 · EGM Cigars, CH (CHF 677.24)	+100%
Montecristo No. 2, 25	€670	€1,336 · EGM Cigars, CH (CHF 906.55)	+99%
Bolívar Belicosos Finos, 25	€524	€937 · EGM Cigars, CH (CHF 635.72)	+79%
Cohiba Robustos, 25	€1,990	€2,583 · EGM Cigars, CH (CHF 1,752.89)	+30%
José L. Piedra Brevas, 25	€53	€168 · EGM Cigars, CH (CHF 113.85)	+215%

Read the last column as the price of the distributor’s absence. A German who wants a box of Epicure No. 2 this month pays double what he paid in August, not because Habanos raised the price but because the only box he can get has to cross a customs border. Cohiba Robustos looks mild at 30 per cent only because the German sticker was already steep. The Piedra number is the cruel one: the cheapest honest box on the board triples, because duty and excise are charged on weight and on value, and a cheap box of 25 carries the same tobacco as a dear one.

The carrier’s customs-handling fee is on top of all of this; it is set by the carrier, not the state, and the board does not model it. The tobacco excise is the part every general duty calculator skips; for cigars it is not a rounding error.

What I would do, and what I would not

I would not panic-buy. The premiums above are real and they are temporary in the sense that every distribution crisis is temporary; whether “temporary” means November or next spring nobody knows. If you have a humidor with a month of cigars in it, sit still. Set a price alert on the vitolas you smoke — every vitola page has one, it is free, and the email arrives when a German retailer lists the box again or when a Swiss price falls under your number. Ten retailers are re-read four times a day; you will know before the forums do.

If you must buy, buy from a shop on the board and read the landed column before the sticker. A CHF 420 box that lands at €619 is still cheaper than a CHF 460 box that lands at €678, and both are cheaper than the £715 box Turmeaus lists, which lands at €1,076 once it has crossed a customs border with British excise already baked into the sticker.

What I would watch most carefully is the grey market. A shortage in the largest EU market is an invitation. Boxes will appear on marketplaces and in direct messages at August prices, with German tax strips and plausible stories. Every one of them is either stock someone is dumping ahead of the insolvency, which is possible, or a fake, which is more likely. The box code on the underside tells you the month and year it was packed; our decoder reads that and refuses to guess the factory, which is precisely the guess a forger relies on you making. If the seller cannot show you the code, the seal and the receipt, the answer is no.

How we know, and what we don’t

The stock figures come from the Finder’s scrapers, which read each retailer’s product pages four times a day and record every pack size with its availability. I checked the German result by hand on three product pages on 15 September. The landed costs are computed by the same code the board uses, from the published customs, excise and VAT rates, with the source for each rate linked on the vitola page.

What we cannot tell you is the day Germany ran dry. Until 10 September our reader gave Noblego the benefit of the doubt on pack sizes whose availability it could not parse, so our own logs before that date overstate German stock and I will not draw a line through them. The timeline above is the trade press’s and the court’s, not ours, and the reporting is listed below. If Noblego’s shelf refills, the board will show it within six hours, and this piece will get a dated update at the top.

Sources: Die Tabakzeitung, report on the Waldshut-Tiengen court order, 11 September 2026; Cigars-connect, report on the 5th Avenue suspension notice, 10 September 2026, and editorial on the Chen Zhi affair and Habanos S.A., 8 August 2026; OCCRP, report on the EU sanctions listing of Prince Group and Chen Zhi, 30 July 2026; Cigar Aficionado, “Germany Halts Distribution Of Cuban Cigars,” 8 September 2026; The Next Cigar Finder, retailer snapshots of 15 September 2026, 13:04 UTC.