Taubman Hiring Spree Lands PJT Largest-Yet Deal With AbbVie

(Bloomberg) -- Paul J. Taubman has long been one of Wall Street’s top telecom and media dealmakers. On Tuesday, he showed that his firm has become an M&A force beyond that industry.

PJT Partners Inc., the boutique investment bank Taubman founded in 2013, is co-advising AbbVie Inc. on its $63 billion deal for rival drugmaker Allergan Plc along with Morgan Stanley. Taubman spent 27 years at Morgan Stanley before starting PJT.

The push comes from a years-long investment in courting health-care bankers, including former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner Jami Rubin who has now successfully navigated the sometimes tricky switch from research to deals.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is advising Allergan on the deal, the third biggest pharmaceuticals merger on record, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The banks together could reap up to $170 million in advisory fees, according to estimates from consulting firm Freeman & Co. Morgan Stanley and PJT could get $60 million to $70 million while JPMorgan Chase could get $80 million to $100 million.

It’s the largest deal yet for PJT, which has built its reputation working on communications industry mega-mergers such as T-Mobile US Inc.’s pending takeover of Sprint Corp. and Comcast Corp.’s purchase of Sky Ltd.

The deal also vaults PJT into the top 10 M&A advisers for the year. The firm is now the No. 8 bank adviser, working on 17 announced deals worth a combined $148 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. It was No. 16 before Tuesday’s deal.

Goldman Hire

Taubman, 58, has been on a hiring spree since taking New York-based PJT public in 2015. It has added several health-care bankers, including partners Rakesh Patel, Bruce Leuchter and Tom Davidson.

Rubin, who was the head of health care research at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. until leaving last year for PJT. As a Goldman analyst, managing director and then partner, she tracked both Allergan and AbbVie.

In September, Rubin led Goldman analysts who advised that new alternatives to Botox meant that Allergan’s stranglehold on the market might slip and its margins narrow.

On an analyst call in July, Rubin asked whether AbbVie was still pursuing a large takeover, a possibility Chief Executive Officer Richard Gonzalez had raised during an investor conference hosted by the bank the previous month.

Gonzalez said on the call that he intended his comment to Rubin at the June 2018 conference to frame how the company would view an acquisition. He noted at the time that that comment “took on a life of its own.”

According to a transcript of the conference, Rubin asked Gonzalez about what size of deal the company would consider executing. He said AbbVie wouldn’t consider something as big as $100 billion, but would weigh a large “bolt-on” in the $20 billion to $30 billion range.

--With assistance from Rebecca Spalding and Cristin Flanagan.

To contact the reporter on this story: Sonali Basak in New York at sbasak7@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Liana Baker at lbaker75@bloomberg.net, ;Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Michael Hytha, Matthew Monks

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