William Delahunt group would reap from licensing deal

Former congressman William Delahunt is listed as one of six managers of Triple M Management Co. LLC.Bill Greene/Globe staff/file 2010/Globe Staff

A nonprofit company led by former congressman William D. Delahunt, which received three coveted state licenses last month for medical marijuana dispensaries, intends to give 50 percent of the company’s revenue to a management firm that is controlled by Delahunt and his business partners in the marijuana dispensary.

In its license applications, Delahunt’s dispensary company, Medical Marijuana of Massachusetts, projected it would earn revenue of roughly $49 million in the first three years from the dispensaries in Plymouth, Mashpee, and Taunton, meaning the management company would get at least $24 million.

Delahunt is listed as one of six managers of Triple M Management Co. LLC, but the application does not spell out Delahunt’s share of income from the management company.

The agreement to give half of the marijuana company’s revenue to the management firm is buried in the three 180-plus-page applications filed by Medical Marijuana. The arrangement was described as “laughable” by the owner of an Andover-based consulting practice that focuses exclusively on nonprofits. “It’s completely excessive,” said Thomas A. McLaughlin of McLaughlin & Associates.

None of the 17 other applicants awarded provisional licenses last month described a similar arrangement with a management company that would receive large payments from the nonprofit dispensaries, according to the Globe’s review of the applications.

Reached on his cellphone Tuesday night in Colombia, Delahunt said the agreement with the management company described in the applications is “an earlier draft that I have nothing to do with.”

“I know we are rewriting it,” Delahunt said. He also said he is a minority stockholder and a passive investor in the management company. He declined to say what his share of the company was, but described it as “a very small percent.”

Delahunt said the 50 percent of revenues going to Triple M was to pay back investors. “They have to get a return on their money,” he said. “It’s not some huge gift.”

In addition to the 50 percent of revenues Delahunt’s management company would receive, it also is slated to earn 8 percent annual interest on $2.47 million it loaned to the dispensary firm for its startup costs, according to the applications filed with the state health department.

Delahunt also is supposed to receive a $250,000 annual salary as chief executive of the marijuana company, according to the applications — although he has said he doesn’t expect to be paid a salary for the first several years while the business is getting off the ground.

Delahunt’s business arrangement is cited in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Suffolk Superior Court on behalf of a Needham company, 1 Relief Inc., which was unsuccessful in its bid for a marijuana license, and is seeking to block the state Department of Public Health from finalizing the 20 provisional licenses it awarded last month.

The suit, filed against the health department and state officials, contends that the department violated state procurement rules in awarding the licenses.

“Everything from beginning to end the Department of Public Health did wrong,” Robert Carp, a Newton lawyer who is representing 1 Relief, said in an interview.

“The money has to be for the patients,” said Carp, who was an applicant for a license himself in an earlier round of consideration. “It’s hard to be patient-centric when you are collecting $250,000 a year in a job you have no training for, and then adding half of the revenue of the managed company that you also control.”

The Globe has reported that Delahunt and all the other top executives in his dispensary company are keeping their full-time jobs and will not be running the firm’s cultivation and dispensing operations.

David Kibbe, a spokesman for the Department of Public Health, said in an e-mailed statement, “No provisional licenses have been handed to applicants. None will be until they clear our verification phase. We do have 20 applicants approved for provisional status, but they have not been given provisional certificates at this point.”

McLaughlin, the Andover consultant, said it’s unusual for a nonprofit to hire a management company, and unheard of that it would take 50 percent of revenues.

“Under no circumstances can I imagine that management would take 50 percent of every revenue dollar,” he said. “What product do you buy or get where you are paying for mostly management?”

He compared the state’s fledgling medical marijuana industry to “the business equivalent of the wild, wild West.”

“If I were on the nonprofit and somebody came in with that deal, I would have laughed them out of the boardroom,” he added.

McLaughlin said that such an arrangement places officers of a nonprofit at risk of being charged with violating their fiduciary duty to the organization.

Since the department awarded the provisional licenses in late January, the Globe and other media have reported that a number of the companies awarded licenses made misstatements in their applications about local support and the agency has acknowledged it didn’t check the veracity of companies’ claims during the evaluation process.

Questions also have been raised about possible conflicts of interest between the agency and some of the winning applicants. Public Health Commissioner Cheryl Bartlett held fund-raisers for Delahunt in the mid-2000s when he was still in Congress, though she said she was not involved in the final selection of winning companies.

The suit lists more than a dozen examples of what appear to be significant mistakes in projected budgets, cultivation plans, and federal tax calculations in applications of the winning companies. The suit contends these should have automatically disqualified the companies from receiving a license under the state’s procurement rules.

“We expect to have a ferocious fight on our hands,” Carp said. “But we believe if a judge understands the information before him, he will see there are too many mistakes to award something this valuable to people who have violated the guidelines.”