The Property Thesis · 6 of 8
Trusts and entities
Cook Islands trusts, Nevis companies, Panama structures: the law can hold while the secrecy fails.
Legal distance. Foreign judgments are not recognized, limitation periods are short, and a creditor must argue the case again on the other side of the world.
The law held; the secrecy did not. A 2013 ICIJ investigation identified the owners of about 700 of the 2,619 trusts then registered in the Cook Islands.8 The Panama Papers (April 2016) exposed 11.5 million documents and about 214,000 entities; governments had recovered about $2 billion by 2026.9 Registers of beneficial owners followed. The EU’s top court ended unrestricted public access to them on November 22, 2022; the registers remain.10
The beneficial owner is inferred from behaviour, payments, travel and correspondence, before any filing is read.
A legal entity is an addressable entity. These structures still do in court what they were built to do. Invisibility was never part of it.