The old folk tales of the Gotthard mountain region in central Switzerland are filled with ghosts. Ghosts appeared everywhere and troubled the unfortunate farmers with storms, avalanches, fires, and sickness. It was believed that the only way to send a ghost back to where he came from was to force him to reveal his name. Supposedly, once that name was no longer secret, the ghost would instantly be dispelled. Deprived of the power to carry on with his evil business, the ghost would disappear and never come back. None of these old folk tales would tell us about a free-spirited man or woman who dared to ask why calling ghosts by their names would instantly dispel them. Believing in the method and its results was enough. The majority of our civilization does not believe in ghosts anymore, but it certainly believes in disturbances. These disturbances are not caused by ghosts but by equally mean-spirited creatures like dictators, terrorists, money launderers, tax evaders, insiders and other criminals. Similar to the old farmers, it is believed that finding out the name of these villains will eventually neutralize them. Beneficial ownership has become a key element of the method to achieve this neutralization. Beneficial ownership is perceived as the sword that cuts through the Gordian knot that complex multi-party and multi jurisdiction business relationships currently resemble. The beneficial ownership concept has been welcomed by Swiss law so eagerly that its current implementation rules prove to be more rigid than their U.S. equivalent. This aspect alone is an invitation to analyze some fundamental aspects of beneficial ownership. At the early stages of this thesis, the intention was to compare the Anglo- American beneficial ownership concept with civil law, and more specifically the Swiss law concept of beneficial ownership. However, deeper research revealed an abundance of source material in the former legal system while the latter was found to be wallowing in the early stage of development, a stage not unlike that of our folk tales phenomenon where solutions were simply accepted and not questioned. This did not prevent the inclusion of Swiss law and various civil law aspects wherever they would provide sufficient counterbalance.