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AVO’S LOUNGING EVERYWHERE!

Plus: Imperial may be ready to finally buy Altadis

Los Angeles, June 6 – Avo Uvezian is everywhere, or at least it seems like it.

Having just passed his 81st birthday, Uvezian is getting ready to open his second “Avo Lounge” in the United States, this time at Burns Tobacconist in Chattanooga, Tennessee on June 24.

A part of the massive Chattanooga Billiard Club and Conference Center, Burns opened in 1998 but now offers an inventory of more than 1,000 different cigars and some 100,000 cigars in total. In typical Avo fashion, the opening of the Avo Lounge will be marked with cigars, food, spirits and entertainment from Uvezian and his jazz trio.

The first Avo Lounge in the U.S. resides inside the Corona Cigar Company store in Lake Mary in central Florida, opened in 2005.

However, the Avo “experience” is even more established in Europe. According to Matthew Kern, the Avo brand manager for Davidoff of Geneva, “there are actually seven AVO Lounges in Switzerland (Aarau, Lenzburg, Rheinfelden, Neuenhof, Basel, Bad Ragaz and Zug) and four AVO Lounges in the works in Germany (Koln, Hannover, Leipzig and Dresden).”

It’s an intelligent response to the continued expansion of smoking bans to have branded smoking areas inside the one place which exempted from smoking regulations: retail tobacco shops. The only other U.S. manufacturer which has undertaken this kind of project is General Cigar with its Club Macanudo facilities, so far located in New York with smaller outlets in Miami, at FedEx Field in Landover, Maryland (home of the Washington Redskins of the NFL), London, England and Jakarta, Indonesia.

Others are springing up slowly. Cuba’s Casa del Habano franchise – with more than 100 locations so far – is more a retail store than a lounge, but look for these facilities to include designated smoking areas as bans expand worldwide.

Imperial looks ready to finally buy Altadis:
Reports from European business sources indicate that Imperial Tobacco is putting the finishing touches on a bid for Altadis, S.A. at €52 a share (currently $70.33 U.S.), a 15.5% raise on its initial offer of €45 a few weeks back.

Before the offers and counter-offers started flying, analysts thought a bid above €50 (about $67.63) would be enough to buy Altadis, which had traded at around €38 (about $51.40) prior to Imperial’s show of interest.

In the meantime, the joint bid by European-based private-equity firms CVC Capital Partners and PAI Partners formally fell apart last week, with PAI informing Altadis it would not participate in the deal. But CVC confirmed its bid at €50.

A wild card in the deal is what the Cuban government might do about the half-share of Habanos, S.A. it sold to Altadis back in 2000. It has been noted that a clause in the sale agreement allows the Cuban to retake full control of Habanos if Altadis is sold, but there is no definitive word on what will happen if Imperial’s offer to purchase Altadis is accepted. Hammer time:
Famous Smoke Shop’s Cigar Auctioneer site featured a hard-to-find box of Padron 1926 Series No. 9 cigars, fat 5 1/2-inch by 56 ring robustos.

The auction ended on May 28 and the 24 cigars in the box were offered singly. The lowest winning bid was right at the suggested retail price of $18.00, with the highest bid at $22.00.

All together, 11 different bidders won cigars at a total of $442.50 or $18.44 each. The biggest winner was a buyer who obtained four cigars at $18.50 or $74.00 in total.

Cigar Box Guitars on display:
Yet another demonstration of the historic use of cigar boxes will be on display this Saturday as the National Cigar Box Museum will be showcased at the Flying Monkey Arts Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Musician Shane Speal has collected more than 70 cigar box instruments, including cigar box violins from the 1880s, primitive guitars made by children in the early 1900s, a performance cigar-box banjo from 1910 and many more recent creations. He tours with this traveling exhibit and performs as part of the Cigar Box Guitar Extravaganza Concert.

The program in Huntsville will include a concert with 11 touring acts, all using cigar-box guitars, plus a program on how to build a cigar-box guitar and a session on advanced techniques for getting the most out of your instrument!

The Govnerator smokes Canada!
Much press coverage has attended the purchase of a cigar by an aide for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger during a trip to Ottawa, Ontario last week.

If the reports filed by the Associated Press and the Washington Post are factual, then the purchase of a Partagas cigar by one of the governor’s aides was in fact in violation of the U.S. trade embargo with Cuba.

In one of the silliest regulations ever issued by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control – the department which oversees enforcement of the embargo – Schwarzenegger’s acquisition and consumption of a Cuban cigar outside U.S. borders is a violation of American law:

“The question is often asked whether American citizens or permanent resident aliens of the United States may legally purchase Cuban origin goods, including tobacco and alcohol products, in a third country for personal use outside the United States. The answer is no.”

Of course, such regulations are unenforceable by the U.S. government outside of U.S. borders. But inside the U.S., the OFAC could enforce these relatively recent regulations – issued September 30, 2004 – with fines or imprisonment under Federal law.

If the cigar purchased for Schwarzenegger was a Partagas, it had to be from Havana. The Dominican-made Partagas manufactured by General Cigar may not be exported for sale outside the U.S. because it would infringe on the Cuban trademark in Canada and other countries.

Schwarzenegger’s people aren’t saying whether the cigar was Cuban because, as spokesman Aaron McLear noted, “There’s no way of telling now because he smoked it.” The next move, if any, is up to OFAC.
~ Rich Perelman

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