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Re:A million-dollar brownstone that no one owned by pjc50 on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @04:53AM (#17808088)
The UK is about to deploy a measure against this kind of thing: https://www.fladgate.com/2017/06/register-of-beneficial-owne...

(Article says "UK" but the UK has two separate property law regimes and title registries, so they may not include Scotland)

Re:A million-dollar brownstone that no one owned by arethuza on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @05:10AM (#17808142)
The Scottish Government seems to be thinking about introducing a register of beneficial owners:

https://www.gov.scot/Publications/2018/06/2736/355007

Finding out who actually owns anything has been recognised by many people as being a problem for a while:

http://www.andywightman.com/archives/category/who-owns-scotl...

Scotland has very old and very weird landownership laws.

Re:A million-dollar brownstone that no one owned by tialaramex on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @10:14AM (#17809747)
This builds on the Persons with Significant Control rules for UK companies. In theory the rules for companies registered with Companies House require that they disclose human individuals who ultimately exercise significant control. For a public company there won't be anybody like that (individual shareholders aren't allowed to own enough of a public company to trigger "significant control"), but for private companies there's often just one or two real humans behind it, even if they own or control it via a trust fund with shares in an off-shore corporation that has special rights in a different off-shore corporation.

In practice Persons with Significant Control is not adequately enforced. Lawyers routinely write in things that aren't people in the PSCs field (e.g foreign company names) for a company and there haven't been any negative consequences for that.

I believe a willing government can and should enforce these rules by concluding that if, in fact, this company has assets but it's controlled by non-human entities, well then the government will seize its assets and add them to the treasury. No humans will be deprived of any assets by doing this so that's fine. When invariably an actual human squawks that their stuff is being taken we've found the actual Persons with Significant Control, they're welcome to pay some token fee, say, £100 000 for the wasted time and effort, and fix their records or we'll keep their stuff.

Re:A million-dollar brownstone that no one owned by 88 on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @02:09PM (#17812178)
Unfortunately it’s usually rich and powerful people who go to great lengths to obfuscate their ownership of assets, so this is politically unviable.