Look Out Below - Tax Issues Could Catch ALIOY Holders By Surprise
(WorldNews Health)

On Friday, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) completed their acquisition of Swiss pharmaceutical company Actelion in a $30B deal (Actelion shareholders received USD$280/share + a share in a new R&D company called Idorsia). J&J paid in USD for a few reasons. For one, as Bloomberg estimated, over half of the shareholders were actually US based. Actelion traded on a few different exchanges with most volume being traded on the Swiss SIX exchange. For anyone planning to buy the shares as a merger arb trade, this complicated things, as you would have to pay for the shares in Swiss Francs (CHF) and then hedge the currency exposure. One alternative to this would have been to purchase the US listed...