Research On Legal Issues Of The Institutionalised Trust Property

This paper is aimed at designing a set of procedures to acknowledge trust property as a legal entity.First,trust property are not taken as legal entity,thereby causing several problems.Let us take collective trust investment,asset-backed securitization and securities investment fund for examples.In practice,trust property has been treated as a legal entity.Trust property can be liable to its creditors and trustee is free from liability incurred from trust itself.Besides,Trust property is consider as accounting subject in law.What's more,trust scheme can be the shareholder of a listed company.All of these show that trust property is substantial legal entity.Denying this will give difficulty in explaining these above-mentioned occurrences.If trust property is considered a legal entity,it will settle the dispute of dual-ownership,supply trust governance rules without amending Trust Law,and achieve the regulation goal.The second part presents two theories in demonstrating why trust property is a legal entity.The first theory comes from the Economics of the Law.Law of trusts provide a set of rules of property partitioning and fiduciary duty,which is as same as corporation law.Therefore,trust law is organizational law and trust itself is an organization.The second theory comes from professor Shinomiya.He thought trust property itself operates for a purpose,which makes trust property transcend trustor's will and become an independent entity.The third part will go deeply into the forms of trusts.Trusts vary in forms,thereby varying in the degree of being an entity,specifically the organizational degree of trust is between corporation and partnership.Comparison will be made between commercial trusts and civil trusts,and commercial trusts in different applications.Differences in purpose,trustee's liability and the number of beneficiaries make commercial trusts more like an entity than civil trust.Furthermore,arrangement in commercial trust plays an important role effecting trust property to be an entity.The last part will focus on how to acknowledge trust property as an entity in China.At first,practice in financial field and legislation in other countries will be introduced.They both show that registration is a method to achieve acknowledging it as an entity.China Trust Registration Co.,Ltd was established to providing registration service of trust products and beneficiary rights.If we take trust property as uncorporated organization which is prescribed in General Provisions of the Civil Law of the People's Republic of China and combine this with a set of registration rules provided by China Trust Registration Co.,Ltd,it is feasible and practical to acknowledge trust property as a legal entity.