A troubled cannabis company founded by Kuwaiti billionaire Bassam Alghanim has sold its assets in the small West Boundary community of Midway. BZAM Ltd., which was granted creditor protection by an Ontario court in February this year, bought a farm on the Kettle River west of Midway in 2019 and set about turning it into a cannabis cultivation operation.
Primarily, this involved the installation of a five kilometre long, three-metre high, ring-lock security fence surrounding a 0.4-square-kilometre bench above the Kettle River. In 2020, BZAM bought the historic, but at that time vacant, Hotel Midway — the scene of a wild-west shootout in the summer of 1908 that left hotelier Charles Thomet dead.
The purchases were among a string of Canada-wide cannabis deals struck by BZAM, whose chairman and largest shareholder is Alghanim. Alghanim, the Los Angeles consul for the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, inherited a fortune from his father's Kuwaiti-based industrial group and is a former chair of the Gulf Bank of Kuwait.
The University of California, Berkeley, graduate ran the family business for a while, but now lives in L.A., where he owns several adjoining properties in the Bel Air neighbourhood. According to the Los Angeles Business Journal, the 72-year-old's net worth is $1.7 billion.
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