In 1849 with $2,500 borrowed from Charles Pfizer’s father, cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart, young entrepreneurs from Germany, opened Charles Pfizer & Company as a fine-chemicals business. It began in a modest red-brick building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York and by 2014 through organic growth and acquisition, it had the second highest revenues for a pharmaceutical company in the world. Now Now Ian Read, its Scottish-born chairman and CEO, wants the group to become Irish for tax purposes. If it succeeds, it will further distort Ireland’s national accounts.