Policy Group Questions Loans for Pfizer Deal

The New York  Times
Cyrus Sanati

Pfizer’s $68 billion acquisition of rival pharmaceutical maker Wyeth is drawing criticism over the $22.5 billion in loans Pfizer received from major Wall Street banks to help close the deal.

The Greenlining Institute, a California-based public policy group, says it has filed an action with the antitrust division of the Department of Justice in which it questioned whether the bank consortium that provided the loans was misusing the billions of dollars they received under the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The group claims that the $22.5 billion would have been better spent on extending loans to the millions of small-business owners that are struggling because they cannot get credit from banks.

Four of the banks that helped fund the Pfizer-Wyeth deal – Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs – received a collective $122 billion in TARP funds.

So the combined $22.5 billion in loan guarantees makes up a significant portion of the cash they received from the government to shore up their balance sheets and spur lending to jump-start the economy.

The Greenlining Institute said it believes that the lending of such a large amount of cash effectively amounts to a backdoor bailout of Big Pharma at the expense of small-business owners that are seeing their credit lines cut and loans denied on a daily basis. Pfizer is the world’s biggest pharmaceuticals company, and its products include Lipitor, the blockbuster cholesterol drug.

The group also argued that the lending violates the spirit of the TARP because the Pfizer-Wyeth deal is expected to cost, at a minimum, 19,500 people their jobs and could send health care costs higher in the long term.

The Pfizer deal is the first major transaction to be financed by the banks since they received TARP funds. It’s not clear if the Greelining Institute’s complaint will get traction in Washington, but it does show the new scrutiny that bailed-out banks are working under. If banks pull back again from corporate lending, it could delay or derail deals already in the pipeline.