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.
The rules issued Monday, aimed at stopping the companies' "tax inversion" deal, wiped out its financial incentives and rationale for Pfizer Inc., though they had no impact on Allergan PLC.
That led Pfizer and Allergan to walk away "by mutual agreement" on Wednesday. Pfizer, which is based in New York, will pay Allergan $150 million as reimbursement for its deal-related expenses.
It was Pfizer's third, and most expensive, failed attempt at an inversion, leaving analysts to speculate Pfizer will drop the strategy for good. The merger would have moved Pfizer's address, but not its operations or headquarters, to Ireland, where it would have paid hundreds of millions of dollars less in annual U.S. corporate 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.
Shares of Pfizer rose 4.8 percent to $32.87, while Allergan shares jumped 7.7 percent to $244.20 Wednesday afternoon.