Moves by the Obama administration to protect the US tax base torpedoed the massive $160 billion merger of drug giants Pfizer and Allergan Wednesday. Pfizer said the deal announced last year, which would have seen it move its corporate domicile to Allergan's Ireland headquarters to slash its US tax bill, was cancelled due to new tax rules directly aimed at halting such "inversion" takeovers.
The companies said they were terminating the merger "by mutual agreement" just hours after President Barack Obama labelled such deals "insidious." The decision to cancel the merger "was driven by the actions announced by the US Department of Treasury on April 4, 2016, which the companies concluded qualified as an 'Adverse Tax Law Change' under the merger agreement," Pfizer said in a statement. The deal, in which Pfizer was to buy Allergan but then move its corporate administrative base into Allergan's Dublin headquarters to benefit from Ireland's ultra-low business tax rates, would have created the world's largest pharmaceutical company.