Pfizer will almost certainly have to offer more than its second bid of £50 a share for rival drug giant AstraZeneca, but the American predator seems to be winning the game of spin so far. For a start, Pfizer chief Ian Read turns out to be a Scottish-born graduate of Imperial College London who has spent his entire career with the company. AstraZeneca, by contrast, is run by a Frenchman, Pascal Soriot, under a Swedish chairman, Leif Johansson, both parachuted in two years ago – reminders that Astra Zeneca is already a multinational with its research facilities divided between Cheshire and Sweden and less than 15 per cent of its workforce based in the UK, and that it has recently recovered from a period of underperformance that provoked the departure of its previous top team.
Ed Miliband’s verbiage about the need for powers to block bids that threaten ‘British jobs and science’ already looks like what it is: opportunism that reveals ignorance and antipathy towards business.
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