Hello and welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm Leon Eileen, Mlex's chief global antitrust correspondent.

Last week, the U.S. said it would delay new requirements put in place by the Obama administration

aimed at slowing inversion deals. These are where U.S. companies move their headquarters overseas

to take advantage of lower tax rates in places like Ireland, Bermuda, and Canada.

The most famous of these inversions involved U.S. drug maker Pfizer, which proposed acquiring

Ireland's Allergan for $160 billion.

That merger would have allowed Pfizer to save an estimated $1 billion annually on its tax

bill by moving its headquarters to Ireland.

That deal was eventually scrapped last year, in large part because of opposition from the Obama

administration.

The IRS delay on the inversion rule comes as Congress is gearing up to tackle tax reform

when it comes back in September.

Here to walk us through it all is Brett Ferguson,

Emlex's senior tax reporter in DC. Hi Brett. Hi Leah. So first, Brett, can you tell us what

were the inversion rules proposed by the Obama administration? Well, let me start by saying

these rules are just a complex beast of a package that the Obama administration put together.

And it's worth saying that there's nothing simple when it comes to international taxation.

And that's reflected when you read through these rules.

I just sat through a 90-minute webinar the other day all about these rules and their effect on

M&A deals, and they barely scratched the surface on what these rules do and how people are

supposed to react. So in a nutshell, what this process was, it started in 2014 with the Obama administration kind of starting to look at ways that they could rein in corporate inversions.

And there were a number of deals like the Pfizer one that you've mentioned too that had received a lot of press attention and a lot of attention even at the household level, people who weren't normally thinking about

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