Beneficial ownership: Difference between revisions
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*[[Constructive trust]] | *[[Constructive trust]] | ||
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Revision as of 16:44, 26 July 2018
Under English law there is a distinction between legal ownership and beneficial ownership. The legal owner is the person in whose name title to the asset is formally registered. The beneficial owner is the person (and in most cases it's the same person) who has effective benefit of the asset: not just its economic risks and rewards, but the effective right to own it.
This might seem an artificial and somewhat fatuous distinction — certainly continental lawyers think so; there’s no concept of that separation at all in the civil law tradition[1] — but it is this very distinction on which the idea of a trust is founded. The Trustee legally owns the trust property, but it does not form part of the trustee’s insolvency estate.
Trusts are excellent things if you are a finance lawyer, and get you out of all kinds of jams.