Further to my post yesterday the UK PM David Cameron has been feeling a bit of heat in the weekly PM’s Questions in the lower House.
He has stated that he wants an assessment from the govt’s business dept and has refused to be drawn in to whether he will apply a Public Interest Test which essentially attempts to establish whether such a deal would be to the UK’s better good.
But anyone who doubted that the govt would not get involved in this deal, whether voluntarily or otherwise, will have to think again.
Said Cameron:
The commitments that have been made so far are encouraging, but let me make it absolutely clear that I’m not satisfied. I want more but the way to get more is to engage.
The fear is that Pfizer will asset strip and/or close down key research areas such as they did in 2011 when they laid off 1,500 staff from its research facility at Sandwich in Kent. The GMB union, which represents workers at AstraZeneca’s Macclesfield plant, has called for the proposed deal to be investigated on competition grounds and queried Pfizer’s promises over UK jobs.
Allan Black, GMB national officer for the chemicals industry said
Pfizer are said to have given undertakings to the UK Government as they increase the money they are offering the AstraZeneca shareholders.Similar undertakings were given by US multinationals before which have proved to be worthless.
This one will run and run for a while yet and we wait to see whether that proposed demand for GBPUSD (some of which has already been front-run ) will finally materialize.
