IRELAND is the venue for industry stalwart Bruce Linton’s latest joint venture in the shape of a €150m private equity fund.
Paris-based Óskare Capital has teamed up with Irish firm Crossroads Capital Management to launch the Óskare Fund.
It is seeking to raise up to €150m from wealthy private and institutional investors – with a minimum stake of €100,000 – to back companies in the medicinal cannabis industry,
Mr Linton, Co-founder and non- Executive Chairman, said: “I am convinced that Europe has the optimal regulatory and research environment to build the future key players in the global medical cannabinoid industry.”
US Legalisation By 2022?
Óskare – the Mohawk name for hemp – is looking to back a portfolio of investments based on the research, development and sale of cannabis-medicinal cannabis products.
Las Month Mr Linton and fellow former Canopy Growth executives Tim Saunders and Geoff Whaling launched the Nasdaq-listed, $150m Collective Growth Group; a SPAC – special purpose acquisition company – targeting hemp and CBD opportunities.
Meanwhile, a fellow NASDAQ-listed SPAC – the Schultze Special Purpose Acquisition Corp – looks set to join forces with Columbian medical cannabis and CBD firm Clever Leaves International and list as separate entity on the market
Back in Mr Linton’s native Canada his successor at Canopy Growth, CEO, David Klein believes US federal legalisation of cannabis could happened as early as 2022.
He says that as more and more individual states opt for legalisation ‘it increases the pressure to not make criminals of people operating legitimate business’.
Sixty Per Cent Interest Rate!
Meanwhile, many fellow Canadian licensed producers continue to face serious challenges on their home turf.
Vancouver-based Zenabis Global has filed amended results for the three months ending March 31, 2020 and 2019 which now showed an additional loss of over $5m.
Shares in Hexo Corp fell sharply after the company was named as a defendant by MediPharm Labs, in a claim for $9.8m in alleged unpaid bills.
Ontario-based MediPharm labs itself has seen sales fall by almost 50% to $11.1m for the three months ending March 31.
South of the border Acreage Holdings secured $15m to help it over the next four months at a premium of 60%. It is secured by, among other items, its cannabis operations in Illinois, New Jersey and Florida, and its US intellectual property.
UK CBD Firm Offloads Legacy Assets
In Europe, the dual-listed AMP German Cannabis Group says it is developing medical brands for a range of cannabis flower strains, extracts and other ‘novel dosage forms’ specifically for the German market, supplied by foreign licenced medical cannabis producers.
The Frankfurt and Canadian Securities Exchange-listed business says large imports are expected to be coming from Canada in the Autumn
One of the UK’s few London Stock Exchange-listed businesses Zoetic International – with a keen focus on the US CBD market – has exited its legacy natural resources business with their sale to Path Investments.
Canadian extraction firm Valens has entered into partnership with Australian firm Cannvalate, in a $50m project to build Australia’s largest medicinal cannabis extraction and contract manufacturing plant at a ‘secret’ location in Melbourne.
