Favorable arbitration judgment in failed cannabis business park development deal with an Indian Reservation
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The defendant was an Indian reservation that reneged on a deal to jointly develop a cannabis industrial park. I provided expert witness testimony for the plaintiff, who had already invested more than $2 million dollars into the deal. By U.S. law, Indian Reservation land cannot be sold to outsiders, so to have some type of real estate interest on the reservation, the outside investor needs to lease the land, and the ownership interest is called a “leasehold interest”. This is how one obtains a valid real estate interest on an Indian reservation and is often done on Indian reservations by developers of gambling casinos, for instance. In this particular case, a client of mine wished to build an cannabis park on an ideally located section of an Indian Reservation, and then he divided the proposed park into pieces to lease out to three willing outside tenants. What he possessed, as a leasehold landlord, is commonly known as “sandwich leasehold interests”. He pays rent to the Reservati...