Is it possible to create a trust without any beneficiaries Is it possible to create a trust without any beneficiaries or one in which the beneficiaries could not 1) change the terms of the trust, and 2) retrieve anything from the trust?
Non-Profits Need Not Have Owners But Must Have A Lawful Purpose Any non-profit company, for example, a 501(c)(3), is ownerless and can be run by a self-perpetuating board if desired, rather than having delegates that provide an outside source for new board members. In that case you have to set forth a purpose of the company or trust, to which its assets and profits must be used, and it must be managed in accordance with that purpose. You can also have a "private foundation" that is effectively ownerless, again with a designated charitable purpose. Generally speaking, the law limits how much compensation can be paid to officers and employees of such a company and restricts self-dealing transactions by such a company. You probably cannot create a valid trust or business with no beneficiaries and no designated charitable purpose which is supposed to merely accumulate its profits and assets. Ownerless Cooperatives Are An Oxymoron Your reference in this and other posts to an "ownerless cooperative" is basically an oxymoron. A cooperative is an entity owned by a class of people who have a contractual relationship with the entity (usually consumers or producers) who are the owners of the company with voting control and who are entitled to an adjustment of their transaction prices with the cooperative via a rebate or surplus check proportionate to the dollar volume of their dealings with the cooperative (Northwest Mutual, must rural electric companies, and most credit unions would be examples of consumer cooperatives, Ocean Spray is a good example of a producers cooperative). An ownerless entity is pretty much by definition not a cooperative. An excellent overview of forms of entity organization other than investor owned stock corporations can be found in The Ownership of Enterprise by Henry Hansmann. The Life Of The Law Is Not Math Or Logic Honestly, it sounds like, in your several posts on the subject, that you are attempting the hide the ball of an ulterior purposes which is material to the legality and organization of an entity. The law is not like science or mathematics. You can't prove a bunch of isolated propositions and then string them together logically. The law operates on an entire comprehensive "fact pattern" and even if every step of your chain of reasoning to an ultimately result is supported by legal authority, this does not mean that this will be the result you get when you put all of the pieces together. That kind of logical reasoning doesn't work in a legal context. The heading of this section is a paraphrase of a famous statement about the law by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. from "The Common Law" (1881) at page 1. Blockchains Are Not The Legal Innovation That They Claim To Be Using blockchain technology to manage "tokens" of voting control in an entity is ultimately completely irrelevant. Blockchain technology is just another alternative to certificated shares, shares kept on an ownership ledger, or shares kept through secondary shareholding intermediaries or brokers. The technology used to keep track of voting control or economic ownership is irrelevant, and some common entities (e.g. homeowner's associations) have ownership that is basically determined via a crude public blockchain called the county clerk and recorder's records. People who think that blockchains provide any significant legal innovation into anything (e.g. here) are fundamentally misguided and typically are not people familiar with the law who have misconceptions about how the law works. Also, contrary to the hype, blockchains are not fraud-proof and indeed, involve serious systemic risks of instability because an error in an old transaction can disrupt lots of current claims. Claims such as those made here that blockchain transactions are irrefutable are naive and basically false. A block chain is a bit like a real property record system without an adverse possession rule to make ancient glitches irrelevant. Moreover, blockchains are a solution to a non-problem. Authenticating ownership and voting rights, economic entitlements, and corporate actions is something that has never posed a very significant economic problem ever since writing was invented. These are economic problems that were already effectively solved in the days of the Minoans, and widespread ownership of well authenticated entities by numerous ever shifting groups of owners was a problem well in hand by the days of the British East India Company. Anonymous Ownership Or Contribution Records Are Illegal Truly anonymous ownership, however, is legally prohibited, even though ownership need not be made a matter of public record. In the case of for profit entities, by securities regulation which requires disclosure for purposes of exercising voting rights and for disclosing large blocks of ownership as required by law, and for purposes of tax law. In the case of non-profit entities, it is prohibited by virtue of laws regulating private foundations that impose tax requirements when certain concentrations of contributions come from a small, related group of people. In the case of political organizations, campaign finance laws require disclosure.
Shareholders own the company There may be different classes of shares in a company with different rights (voting, dividends, preferential distribution etc.) but if you own a share you own (part of) the company. Just as a side note, there are companies that are not limited by shares - their ownership structure is different. Similarly, there are unit trusts where ownership of a share entitles you to distributions, making you a beneficiary but the owner is someone else (usually a holding company).
They cannot force a contract on you after the fact. You should leave these numbskulls alone, they are clearly up to something that makes them likely to be sued. I am adding the following: it's not illegal as far as I know to declare anything you want to a person as long as it isn't a threat. &quot;You are now beholden to give me your firstborn makle child.&quot; lol, no.
It sort of depends on what the will says, for example if the will says &quot;shall receive 1% of the value of my estate at the moment of my death&quot;, that answers your question. That's a bit unlikely, more probably it just says &quot;shall receive 1% of my estate&quot;, in which case this refers to &quot;the totality of what is left to disburse to beneficiaries&quot;, that is, after obligations have been discharged (debts, taxes, funeral expenses, expense of estate administration). You also have to disburse specific benefits first, for example &quot;$10,000 to Aunt Luddy&quot;, &quot;the car to cousin Billy&quot;. Thereafter, percentages (implied such as &quot;equally&quot; or explicit such as &quot;2%&quot;) are then computed over the remainder. Ideally, you will know the current value of everything left and can do the math and transfer title all at once. This might be a bit impractical for an entire estate, but it is practical for an estate composed of a bunch of divisible assets. All of the securities can be transferred on one day; the house may be sold a month later and assets re-distributed according to the formula at that point. In other words, you don't need a fixed instant for computing and distributing the estate, you just need to distribute each asset according to the terms of the estate.
In the second case, is there anything to declare to the taxes? Yes, just like in the scenario of depositing in your bank account. Otherwise it would be easy for everybody to avoid the heavy tax burden by bartering or transacting without the use of official currency. The Code général des impôts in its Article 13 includes in the concept of bénéfice ou revenu imposable the market value of profits and benefits in kind (&quot;y compris la valeur des profits et avantages en nature&quot;).
Yes. It is fairly common for there to be one owner at law, but another person who has a beneficial interest - such as a long-term cohabiting partner. This may arise because the parties set it up that way, or perhaps more often when courts find that there is a &quot;constructive trust&quot; or a &quot;resulting trust&quot;. See for example the concurring opinion of Lord Hope of Craighead in Stack v Dowden [2007] UKHL 17, Parties are, of course, free to enter into whatever bargain they wish and, so long as it is clearly expressed and can be proved, the court will give effect to it. But for the rest the state of the legal title will determine the right starting point. The onus is then on the party who contends that the beneficial interests are divided between them otherwise than as the title shows to demonstrate this on the facts. The resulting court process may find that the beneficial interest exists, or not, and what fraction of the property it represents. It's common to find situations where one party put up most or all of the whole purchase price of a house, which was then registered in both names, and they then disagree about whether it should be split 50-50 or otherwise - that's an example of the beneficial ownership differing in proportion from the (equal) legal ownership. (See Jones v Kernott [2011] UKSC 53 at paragraph 51 for an explanation of this particular pattern.) The same sort of case arises when a cohabiting partner does not own the house, but still contributes to the mortgage and other bills - then, depending on the facts at hand, there may be a &quot;constructive trust&quot;, and the partner is entitled to a share of the sale price of the house even though they are not its legal owner. A &quot;resulting trust&quot; might arise when someone contributed money for the purchase of the property, even though they didn't end up as a registered owner, but the parties acted in other respects as if they were joint owners.
The child C cannot receive anything as a "gesture despite the Will" if everything in the Will is left to B; unless B agrees to a Deed of Variation the Executor is legally bound to follow the instructions in the Will. C may have a claim if he is dependent on A at the time of A's death and A has failed to make provision. It is possible that A's sibling S might also have a claim if dependent. Although you have tagged the question as United Kingdom, inheritance and intestacy law differs widely between England and Scotland. Such a Will should be drafted by a specialist trust and executry planning solicitor to avoid the risk of contentious probate.
No contract can limit a court's jurisdiction An NDA is a contract: it cannot prevent the application of the judicial process. Should your dispute reach a courtroom, the NDA and the documents it seeks to protect are all admissible and you should subpoena them from the defendant and submit those copies to the court (that way you are not breaking the terms of the NDA). What is not admissible is bona fide "without prejudice" documents: that is documents that contain admissions and offers made in a genuine attempt to settle a dispute. This privilege is established by the context of the document, not by if it does or does not have the words "without prejudice" on it (except, of course, that their presence/absence is part of the context).