Allergan, Pfizer call off proposed $160B merger
Top U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and Irish rival Allergan are charting independent futures after scrapping a record $160 billion deal torpedoed by new Treasury Department rules meant to block American companies from moving their corporate addresses overseas — on paper — to avoid U.S. taxes.
Tax inversions, in which a big U.S. company buys a smaller one in another country with a lower tax rate, and then moves the combined company's address there on paper, are a hot issue in the presidential race.
President Obama on Tuesday called them "one of the most insidious tax loopholes out there," adding that Treasury's new rules are meant to make wealthy corporations shoulder their tax responsibility like working-class Americans.
"Allergan will continue to invest in the United States," Saunders said, with a focus on jobs creation, expanding factories and research facilities, and doing research on cures for diseases with huge unmet need.
Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, pain treatment Lyrica and pneumonia vaccine Prevnar-13, said in a statement that its "late-stage pipeline has several attractive commercial opportunities" in multiple disease areas.
Deals like last year's purchase of injected drug maker Hospira have kept Pfizer among the top global drugmakers but haven't pleased investors enough, ultimately triggering the 2010 ouster of Read's predecessor.
[...] Medtronic PLC, which relocated from Minnesota to Dublin in January 2015 after buying fellow medical device maker Covidien for $42.9 billion, said in a statement that it had done a preliminary review of the new Treasury rules and concluded they wouldn't have a material effect on the company.