The pharmaceutical company Mylan has been taking on a boatload of vituperation — and rightfully so — for a 500% hike in the price of its lifesaving EpiPen injector, which reverses allergic reactions.
But there’s another reason to detest this remarkably amoral corporation:
It’s also a tax dodger. Mylan is one of the leading exploiters of the technique known as inversion, in which a U.S. company cuts its tax bill by acquiring a foreign firm and moving its tax domicile to the acquired company’s homeland.
Mylan’s 2014 deal involved its buying a generics manufacturer from Abbott Laboratories and reincorporating in the Netherlands, the subsidiary’s home. As in all inversions, nothing else changed: Mylan’s operational headquarters remained in Pennsylvania, and its main workforce didn’t relocate. At one point, Mylan even appealed to U.S. antitrust officials to help it block a takeover bid from an Israeli company. But the inversion deal did allow the firm to cut its U.S. tax bill.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-mylan-inversion-20160823-snap-story.html