A foundation belongs to no one. It is a separate pool of assets with a purpose, administered by a foundation board. To establish who ultimately benefits, CDB 20 provides a separate form for non-operating foundations: Form S, the counterpart to Form T for trusts.
Which foundations
What matters is whether the foundation operates a business. A family foundation that holds assets and makes distributions to family members is non-operating and receives a Form S. A foundation that runs a business itself is treated like an operating legal entity and uses Form K. For charitable foundations many banks require no such form, because there are no beneficiaries in the sense of asset distributions to specific persons.
What is recorded
The effective founder, meaning the person who actually contributed the assets; the members of the foundation board; curators or protectors, if any; the beneficiaries, by name or as a class; and persons who can amend the deed or revoke the foundation. As with trusts, the difference between the formal and the effective founder is where forms most often go wrong.
A sanctioned error
In a leading case the CDB supervisory board held that a bank which accepts a Form A for a foundation instead of obtaining a Form S or an equivalent declaration breaches its duty to establish beneficial ownership. Choosing the form is therefore not a formality but part of due diligence.
Foundations and the TJPG
Foundations are exempt from the duty to report to the transparency register. That does not change the bank’s checks: for the bank, Form S remains the relevant declaration. Family structures with a foundation and companies must keep two documentation paths consistent, the bank forms for the foundation and the register filings for the companies.