Burger King expects merger complete next week

Fast food giant Burger King said Friday that it expected to complete its merger with Tim Hortons next week, putting the final touches on a deal that continues to reverberate around Capitol Hill.

{mosads}Burger King said the deal with the Canadian coffee-and-doughnuts chain would likely be finalized next Friday after getting cleared by Canadian authorities. Tim Hortons shareholders and the Ontario Superior Court of Justice have yet to approve the deal, the two companies said in a statement.

The companies announced the merger in August, when Washington was concentrating on the practice of American companies moving their headquarters overseas to avoid paying the U.S. corporate tax rate, also known as inversions.

At the time, Burger King became the most prominent company to announce such a merger, but the company has long said that cutting its tax bill was not a major motivation in the deal. So has Warren Buffett, an ally of President Obama who helped finance the deal.

Democrats have been pushing legislation to curb those sorts of deals, with little interest from Republicans.

Those proposals likely wouldn’t have stopped the Burger King deal. Still, the deal has raised Democrats’ ire, and is part of liberals’ opposition to Antonio Weiss, whom Obama has tapped for a senior Treasury post. Weiss, an investment banker at Lazard, was an adviser on the Burger King deal.