Understanding corporate ownership structures

Direct ownership

The simplest shape: one or more natural persons hold shares in the company directly. The shareholder of record and the beneficial owner are the same fact, with nothing further to resolve.

Layered holding structures

A holding company owns the operating company; a person (or another holding company) owns the holding company. Each additional layer is another register lookup, and the effective percentage at the bottom is the product of the percentages at each layer, not simply the top-layer figure. See ownership resolution.

Cross-border structures

Ownership that crosses jurisdictions means each layer may sit behind a different register, with different disclosure rules and different access terms - a chain can resolve cleanly through one country's register and stop entirely at the next simply because that jurisdiction discloses less.

Circular and self-referential holdings

Occasionally a structure loops back on itself - a holding pattern where following the chain would never terminate. A resolution process needs to detect this explicitly and stop, rather than loop indefinitely; see the circular_holding stop reason in how Keizu determines a UBO.

Fiduciary and nominee arrangements

A holding registered in a fiduciary's or nominee's name, rather than the person who actually controls it, is structurally simple but substantively opaque - the register itself doesn't name the real owner. See fiduciary & nominee ownership.

Genuinely ownerless entities

Some entities - certain foundations, trusts, and similar arrangements - are structured to have no natural beneficial owner at all. This is a different, complete answer from a chain that failed to resolve, and Keizu's resolution engine distinguishes the two explicitly rather than treating both as an empty result.