Go back to Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue for a moment, the Equatorial Guinean government minister from article two who spent an estimated $300 million on property and luxury goods while earning an official salary of under $100,000 a year. Part of how he moved that much money into real estate for as long as he did was never putting his own name directly on a purchase. His $30 million Malibu mansion, and a similarly lavish estate in Paris, were acquired through corporate entities and third parties rather than in his own name.¹ On paper, none of this looked like one person's fortune. It looked like a scattering of ordinary property transactions involving a handful of unremarkable companies. That scattering was the entire point.

This is the structure at the centre of nearly every major property laundering case this series has covered so far, the Sydney apartment bought through offshore shell companies, the web of corporate buyers in Singapore's S$3 billion case, Obiang's own use of companies and associates. Criminals rarely buy property in their own name using their own bank account. They buy it through something, a trust, a company, a relative, precisely because each layer makes the next professional down the chain less likely to ask the one question that matters: who actually controls this money?

A trust separates legal ownership from beneficial ownership by design, that's literally what a trust is for, and in most everyday uses it's a completely legitimate tool for estate planning, asset protection or tax purposes. A company does something similar: the company owns the asset, and the company's owners sit one step removed, sometimes many steps removed if that company is itself owned by another company registered somewhere else entirely.

Criminals didn't invent this distance. They just borrowed it. British Columbia's own Expert Panel on Money Laundering in Real Estate, convened by the provincial government in 2018 after investigators traced billions of dollars in suspicious funds into the province's housing market, concluded that beneficial ownership transparency, simply knowing who actually stands behind a trust or company, was "the single most important measure that can be taken to combat money laundering" in the province's property market.² That's a striking thing for a government inquiry to conclude. Not tighter banking rules, not more police resources. Just knowing who really owns what.

A nominee arrangement is simple in concept and effective precisely because of that simplicity: put a relative, associate or company's name on the title, while someone else entirely funds and controls the purchase. Obiang's case shows the pattern clearly. US investigators found he had used corporate vehicles and intermediaries to acquire property in the United States and France, distancing his own name from transactions his government salary could never have explained.¹

That's the core vulnerability nominee arrangements exploit. A real estate agent sees one buyer at a time. A conveyancer sees one file at a time. Money laundering through nominees works precisely because it's designed to look, from any single professional's vantage point, like nothing unusual at all. Nobody handling any individual sale has an obvious reason to notice a wider pattern, unless they specifically ask who is really behind the money and where it's really coming from.

After its Expert Panel's findings, British Columbia built the Land Owner Transparency Registry, the first registry of its kind in Canada, which came into force in November 2020.³ Any corporation, partnership or trust acquiring an interest in land in BC now has to file a transparency report identifying the real people who ultimately control or benefit from that property, not just the name on the title.⁴ Crucially, the registry looks straight through layered structures. If a nominee company holds a property on behalf of a second company as beneficial owner through a bare trust, the registry doesn't stop at the corporate owner, it keeps going until it reaches an actual named individual.⁵

BC's own Attorney General was blunt about what the registry was built to fix: for years, people had concealed their identities behind corporations and trusts while using the province's real estate market to hide the proceeds of crime.⁶ The registry isn't a perfect fix, even its supporters acknowledge that determined people can still rely on informal handshake arrangements a public registry won't catch.⁷ But it changed the default. Hiding behind a structure now requires actively evading a disclosure requirement, rather than simply relying on nobody asking.

Australia doesn't yet have an equivalent public beneficial ownership registry for real estate, which is precisely why the burden falls more heavily on individual professionals under Tranche 2. Where BC built a government registry to answer "who really owns this," Australian real estate agents, conveyancers and lawyers are now expected to answer that question themselves, client by client, transaction by transaction, as part of their own due diligence obligations from 1 July 2026.

You don't need a public registry to ask the right questions. You need to treat certain structures as an automatic prompt to dig one level deeper, rather than a reason to stop asking:

None of this means refusing to act for anyone who uses a trust or a company, that would make ordinary business impossible. It means treating "who is the real person behind this structure" as a question you actually answer and document, not one you assume someone else, a bank, a lawyer, the land titles office, has already asked on your behalf.

Obiang's $300 million spending spree didn't stay hidden for years because his paperwork was flawless. It stayed hidden because every professional along the way only ever saw one piece of a much larger picture, one company, one intermediary, one transaction at a time. British Columbia's answer to the same underlying problem was to build a public registry that forces that bigger picture into daylight. Australia's answer, for now, is to expect the professionals closest to the transaction, agents, conveyancers, lawyers, to ask the question a registry would otherwise answer.

The next article in this series looks at a different but closely related problem: how professionals themselves, lawyers, accountants and agents, can end up functioning as an unwitting part of these same structures, and what that means for how you handle referrals and introductions in your own network.

Next in this series: "Case Study: Professional Enabler Risk in Cross-Border Wealth Structures."