Article content

At the end of May, marijuana company Cannabis Wheaton Income Corp. raised $115 million in a bought deal co-led by the Bank of Montreal’s investment banking arm.

The deal, the third involving BMO in the past six months, appeared to confirm a narrative developing in Canada’s cannabis industry: that mainstream financial support, for the most part sidelined by legal and reputational concerns, was finally pouring into the sector.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or How a handful of hedge funds cornered cannabis financing — and made a killing in the process Back to video

But for those who have watched the emergence of the industry, a peek inside the deal book would have revealed a familiar name.

More than half of the securities offered — $61.7-million worth of shares and share purchase warrants — were bought by a single hedge fund, MMCap International Inc.

MMCap is a Cayman Island-domiciled “opportunistic multi-strategy fund” that bills itself as being focused on mergers, short selling, convertible arbitrage and other “special situations.”