Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing corporations owning property in Thailand. This is kind of something you need to be careful with as I have discussed in other videos, most notably as we have discussed at length, there was recently a raid in Phuket where they actually raided, I believe it was an accounting firm that were setting up companies, for basically foreigners to own property. You have got to be really careful with that because foreign ownership of Thai land is prohibited under law; utilizing a company to sort of act as a tool of subterfuge or as a tool to circumvent that law can result in some really big problems as we discussed on a number of videos I made on that topic involving that recent raid down in Phuket. 

Another thing that people don't really think about and I think they should in the context of Corporate ownership of land here in Thailand is if you don't maintain ongoing corporate compliance, you can run into some real problems. We have recently, one of the Thai lawyers here in the office came to me and was just telling me about one of her cases - honestly I don't run point on these cases; the Thai Attorneys, the Thai lawyers in our office are the ones that handle that stuff directly, again as it says in my title, I am basically the Managing Director around here and that kind of entails a lot more management these days unfortunately than actually getting to see the cool stuff that goes on. I am a big comparative law guy so I kind of like to watch how different legal systems operate - but one of the gals here in the office came to me and said "yeah look, this client hired us to do some due diligence stuff associated with this condo they want to sell, they own it, but it's through a company. Well the company's accounting is in arrears, like really, really in arrears. They haven't filed their yearly audits, they haven't done their balance sheets and things, I mean just minimum compliance.” Well that is a real problem because a company can effectively go defunct and like trying to get it out of that categorization with the Ministry of Commerce, that in and of itself can be a chore. I mean just trying to deal with it can be a major problem. 

So the thing to take away from this video, if you are looking to buy or you have property that is in a company, you need to be very on the ball about maintaining ongoing tax and accounting compliance associated with the entity that's owning that property.