|
Marissa
Mayer is a new entry this year
|
$19 billion. That is what one analyst estimated could have
been the tax cost of Yahoo's spin-off of its $31 billion stake
in Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company. No doubt Marissa
Mayer, the chief executive officer of Yahoo, would prefer if
she did not grab so many headlines. It would allow her to get
on with the job of securing the future of one of the pioneering
companies of the early internet. But she is in this list
because, for what seemed like the whole of 2015, analysts and
the business media discussed her plans for the Alibaba
transaction. When the Internal Revenue Service declined to
state categorically that it would treat the transaction as
tax-free, it was back to the drawing board for Mayer and her
tax advisers, believed to be Skadden Arps Slate Meagher &
Flom, and they came up with a structure called a reverse spin,
which will see the company's core internet business, including
a large stake in Yahoo Japan being spun off and the Alibaba
stake retained. The transaction is expected to take most of
2016 to complete.
The now-shelved Alibaba deal was another example of the
increasing trend for tax to be front-and-centre of the biggest
corporate transactions. For example, Pfizer's takeover of
Allergan hinged on how to achieve the tax inversion that would
allow the new company to become tax resident in Ireland, where
the corporate tax rate is 12.5%, rather than the US, where it
is more than 20 percentage points higher. And GE said tax was a
"catalyst" in its decision earlier this year to move its
headquarters from Stamford, Connecticut to Boston,
Massachussetts.