AGN—I wonder if this ploy will succeed at all—courts in equity are happy to look beyond the form of a deal and look to substance. AGN still responsible for defending patents and still the overwhelming beneficiary of them, so you could argue they are the real owner.
You’ve verbalized what I was driving at in the tweets referenced in #msg-134489021. Note, however, that in the Restasis patent trial in US District Court (in contrast to the Restasis IPC), AGN and the Tribe are the Hatch-Waxman plaintiffs, so the sovereign-immunity angle presumably won’t come into play there.
“The efficient-market hypothesis may be the foremost piece of B.S. ever promulgated in any area of human knowledge!”