Several people or companies of Cuban origin set up corporate shop in Luxembourg
_fitted%20(1).jpeg "Deborah Andollo Lopez")
Some prominent people and companies of Cuban origin appear as beneficial owners of entities found in the Luxembourg corporate registry.
There is nothing wrong or inappropriate about appearing in the registry. They and other owners of companies in Luxembourg, a country viewed as a tax haven, weren’t identifiable until the registry began publishing the names of the true owners in 2019.
Even then the registry was not made searchable by owner, just the name of entity.
That changed with OpenLux reporting project, a collaboration of several news organizations, including France’s Le Monde, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and the Miami Herald, el Nuevo Herald and their parent, McClatchy, who all worked off a searchable non-public version. The following prominent Cuban names appear:
▪ Maria Teresa Mestre: Born in Havana in 1956, Mestre is the grand duchess of Luxembourg, Her wealthy family fled Fidel Castro’s land confiscations in Cuba in 1960. The family eventually settled in Geneva, where years later she met Henri Albert Gabriel Félix Marie Guillaume, now Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg, the constitutional monarch. She has four charitable foundations in the Luxembourg registry, whose focus includes women’s empowerment and microfinance in poor countries.
▪ Deborah Andollo Lopez: A famous Cuba-born deep-water free diver who set records in the late 1980s and 1990s. In 1996, Andollo dove to a then-record depth of about 357 feet. Now residing in Mexico, she has a nonprofit diving academy registered in Luxembourg called Blue Yemaya.
▪ Leopoldo Fernández Pujals: Born in Havana, Fernández was a teenager when his family fled to Miami, and later he became a decorated Marine Corps instructor. His second act was as a corporate executive, later chucking that career to launch a successful pizza chain in Spain and branching into other businesses. He has a registered company in Luxembourg called Symbols Sarl, a firm that lists as its specialty the recovery of financial debts and litigation.
▪ Havana Club Holding S.A. and the related Havana Club Know-How Sarl: Manufactured under the control of the Cuban state-run company Cuba Ron S.A., Havana Club rum was registered in Luxembourg as part of a 1993 agreement between the Cuban government and France’s Pernod Ricard to market and distribute internationally. This was possible because of a lapse in the trademark registration. U.S. giant Bacardi obtained some competing rights to the brand in 1994 and has been offering a competing rum of the same name and litigating with the Cuban government ever since. The Luxembourg documents show that at the end of 2018, Havana Club Holdings boasted total assets — capital, reserves and liabilities — exceeding 167.6 million euros (about $192.7 million in U.S. dollars at the time).
This story was originally published February 12, 2021 at 7:41 AM.
