Teva offices in Jerusalem
Teva offices in JerusalemFlash 90

The Federal Trade Commision (FTC), has approved Israeli-based pharmaceutical company Teva's acquisition of Allergan's generic drug production business, after a yearlong bid to win the approval of the regulatory body, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The deal was announced last July, and was valued at 40.5 Billion Dollars at the time, making Teva one of the world's biggest drug companies.

One of the FTC's mandates is to prevent monopolization, and the regulatory body feared that the buyout of another large producer of generic drugs by mega-corporation Teva would result in a drastic reduction in competition, causing prices of generic drugs to rise.

Teva finally won the approval by agreeing to sell 75 of it's drugs to rivals in the industry. The drugs being sold for production by other companies are of a wide variety, from cancer treatments to anesthetics to antibiotics, thus preserving competition in many different markets.

Allergan, formerly Actavis, had also agreed to a separate deal to sell the rest of its business to pharmaceutical giant Pfizer for $150 Billion, but the deal fell through due to new US corporate regulations.

Teva Chief Executive Erez Vigodman said the company is “pleased to have received all of the requisite regulatory approvals,” saying that the enormous new deal is “a transformative step.”

The deal is the latest in a string of acquisitions by Teva over the past fifteen years, and should give it a much larger share of the extremely competitive generic drugs market.