The buyer looking to purchase Andy Sanborn’s Concord Casino wasn’t just planning to buy the small gaming business — they were set to purchase The Draft downtown sports bar along with the approvals he received to build a new 43,000-square-foot betting and entertainment venue off Loudon Road.

Court documents reveal that if the sale had gone through, Sanborn, a Bedford resident, would have received an additional $40 million to the price tag of Concord Casino to develop the new casino and he would have walked away with no further business ties in Concord.

The exact sale price between Sanborn and the buyer for his company Win Win Win, which owns Concord Casino, is unknown.

“The Seller has reluctantly agreed to sell me the entire property at 67 South Main St, which would include both Win Win Win and The can Draft of which I would own and operate both, and the Seller would have no further involvement,” the buyer wrote to the New Hampshire Lottery Commission in an email, according to court documents.

A previously sealed document revealed that the buyer was set to pay at least $8.5 million to transform Sanborn’s proposed 43,000-square-foot casino site off Loudon Road into a Historic Horse Racing facility, but only after a legal battle with an abutter was settled in the Supreme Court.

Once the case was resolved and the facility opened as a permanent betting site, the buyer was willing to pay up to $30 million in installments over five years. However, if the new, larger facility didn’t generate enough cash flow during that time, no payments would be made, court documents show.

The sale never went through because the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office determined that neither Win Win Win nor the unnamed buyer were suitable to operate a charitable gaming business.

That decision came just eight days after Sanborn was arrested on charges of theft by deception and theft by unauthorized taking related to the state’s pandemic relief program, the Main Street Relief Fund.

In its suitability letter, the state flagged two main concerns for not approving the sale.

First, the purchase and lease agreements still tied Sanborn to the business. Second, regulators questioned whether the buyer had the financial means to follow through on the deal.

“The Attorney General raised serious concerns as to whether Win Win Win can be found sustainable under any circumstances,” the New Hampshire Lottery Commission wrote.

Over the ten-month back-and-forth to determine suitability, with multiple meetings before a hearings officer, Sanborn’s legal team accused the Attorney General of bad faith and delaying the sale, while state officials argued that Sanborn was failing to provide required documentation.

Sanborn said he wanted no role in managing, influencing operations, or exerting control over the business after the sale.

“I want no involvement in WWW after the sale – I want a clean break from my participation in charitable gaming,” he wrote to the buyer. “Closing the sale may be my only chance to recoup a small portion of the value of a business I spent years building.”

A joint investigation by the New Hampshire Lottery Commission and the Attorney General’s Office in 2023 found that Sanborn had fraudulently obtained and misused $844,000 in pandemic relief funds — money meant for small businesses, not casinos. He was later ordered to shut down his casino and sell his business as he was found unsuitable for the state’s charitable gaming mode.

The buyer attempted to address the state’s concerns and have the deal go through, but the Lottery Commission said the issue was out of their jurisdiction.

However, in a later email to the buyer, Arroyo Cooley, the Lottery’s chief compliance officer, clarified that the suitability determination “concerned a proposed business transaction and not your personal character or qualifications.”

Sanborn recently made another attempt to have criminal charges against him dropped.

Sruthi Gopalakrishnan be reached at sgopalakrishnan@cmonitor.com