Blow me down, but Layton certainly did resign to "pursue other interests" ...

AusCann chief is looking for love

Myriam RobinColumnist

Feb 7, 2023 – 4.07pm

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The worlds of reality television and high finance rarely mix. Which must be why it took an astounding six episodes for a member of Australia’s investment community to alert us to the fact that the tattooed “biotech CEO” desperately looking for love on the latest season of Nine’s Married at First Sight is none other than Layton Mills, the current chief of listed cannabis minnow AusCann.

For those living under a rock, the basic premise of the cult TV series (aired by our publisher’s TV arm) is throwing (sorry, “scientifically matching”) two people who’ve never seen each other into a marriage-like “commitment ceremony”, then filming the awkward (at best) results for the enjoyment of the armchair anthropologists at home.

Layton Mills in 2018, when he was CEO of cannabis-for-pets company CannPal.

Sunday’s episode of the show’s tenth series showed Mills’ Sydney Harbour “marriage” to Brisbane beauty entrepreneur Melinda Willis, who wasn’t much impressed. (“He may be punching [above his weight] just a little,” she told the cameras. “I would swipe left”) A heartfelt wedding speech convinced Willis to keep an open mind, only for her expectations to be dashed again after Mills took her reluctance to share a bed as an invitation to pull out his laptop and spend his wedding night working.

Of course, it’s not like AusCann has nothing going on. The pot stock is presently suspended, pending its adherence to ASX listing rules surrounding a “proposed transaction”, further details of which will be announced “in due course”. It’s also hunting for a new CEO, Mills having tendered his resignation with a six-month handover period back in September to pursue “other business interests”. Which is one way to describe the effects of a call from a casting producer.

Mills is described in his contestant biography as the founder of a pet-focused medicinal cannabis company, a reference to the listed CannPal that was sold to AusCann in a scrip deal in November 2020. As for his present commitments, Mills wouldn’t be the first listed chief to take some time off to get married, though the requirements of these nuptials are far from typical.

It is, incidentally, far from his first brush with the indignities of the genre. He first appeared on Channel 10 obstacle course show Wipeout Australia in 2010, and on Seven’s First Dates in 2016, where he admitted to four hook-ups with his on-screen partner after their filmed date, but demurred on whether he was, at that point, “in love”. Go figure: that relationship didn’t last.