How Britain’s No. 10 intervened in the AstraZeneca-Bristol merger

AstraZeneca’s planned $400 billion deal with Bristol Myers Squibb triggered worries at the UK government’s highest levels, prompting outreach that helped contribute to the collapse of the deal, according to people briefed on the deal.Varun Chandra, the UK’s top business envoy and an adviser to Prime Minister Andy Burnham, called AstraZeneca CEO Sir Pascal Soriot directly to convey that the deal would be a significant problem for His Majesty’s government, the people said. The call was prompted by a Financial Times report, earlier this month, that the two companies were in talks about what would have been one of the largest-ever mergers.While Chandra didn’t explicitly tell Soriot to kill the deal, the call piled on to opposition from AstraZeneca shareholders that prompted Soriot and AstraZen