Sugar Importer With Trump Ties Said to Maintain Abusive Labor Practices

Weeks after President Trump began his second term, his administration quietly lifted a measure that had blocked a major sugar producer in the Dominican Republic from shipping its product to the United States over concerns about forced labor at the company’s plantations.

The owner of the company, Central Romana, has cultivated close political ties to Mr. Trump, donating to his 2024 campaign and his White House ballroom project. José Fanjul, a Cuban American businessman known as Pepe, has hosted Mr. Trump at his Fifth Avenue apartment and attended a state dinner at the White House welcoming King Charles III and Queen Camilla to the United States.

The decision to allow Central Romana to send sugar to the United States has raised inferences of political interference, along with concern from labor groups that have been monitoring working conditions on the company’s Dominican farms.

On Tuesday, one nonprofit watchdog group, the Corporate Accountability Lab, released a report saying that many of the abusive conditions that led to the United States’ blocking sugar from Central Romana in 2022 had not been rectified.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/business/economy/trump-central-romana-sugar-forced-labor.html