Billionaire activist-investor Carl Icahn offers an interview on FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto show in NY city February 11, 2014.
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Activist investor Carl Icahn disclosed a “large position” in Allergan (AGN – Analyst Report) Tuesday morning.
AGN is trading at $238.85, up $2.91 or 1.23 percent on a volume of 1.87 million shares.
Icahn expressed support for Allergan CEO Brent Saunders.
Saunders has come close to Icahn before. Saunders became CEO of Allergan after it was bought by Actavis, where he had actually been CEO, and then altered its name. Saunders had moved into the top spot at Actavis from the CEO job at Forest Labs, which Actavis acquired.
Allergan on Tuesday said it “has no reason to believe that this investment was made for purposes of influencing the actions of management or control of the company”. Icahn wrote to Apple CEO Tim Cook that he “could not be more supportive of you, the existing management team, the culture at Apple and the innovative spirit it engenders”, after he disclosed his position in the company in August 2013. Icahn said he sold the Forest position when the service changed hands. It is now in the process of selling its generics business to Teva Pharmaceutical (NYSE:TEVA) for approximately $40 billion.
After the collapse of the Pfizer deal, Allergan is at a crossroads. The new stake in the company comes a couple of months after it failed to merge with rival Pfizer Inc. The deal was designed as a corporate inversion transaction that would have enabled New York-based Pfizer to cut its future tax bills by shifting its corporate headquarters to Ireland, where government levies are lower.
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In April, Allergan and Pfizer, the largest United States drug maker, called off a $160-billion tie-up due to a fresh tightening of United States rules on cross-border tax inversions, in which a company relocates its headquarters to a foreign country for tax advantages.
