Your business shouldn't be everyone's business.

Switzerland's reputation for discretion is, for once, accurate. Swiss data protection law carries criminal penalties of up to CHF 250,000, and unusually, those penalties can fall on the individual decision-maker rather than just the company. Switzerland also declined to follow the EU toward public beneficial ownership registers, a position reinforced after a European court found that such registers can breach fundamental privacy rights. Liechtenstein takes the same view.

That protection is genuine, but it covers what sits inside Switzerland and Liechtenstein. It doesn't automatically follow you to a property in Italy, an apartment in France, or a holding in any other country with its own rules about who can look you up.

Privacy is not one setting that is either on or off. There are three different audiences who might want to know what you own, and a foundation answers each of them differently.

The first is the public: a journalist, a competitor, a curious acquaintance, anyone with no legal standing and no relationship to you, searching a register simply because they can. The UK's Land Registry is the clearest example. Anyone can look up a property and see the owner's name online, no justification required. Italy has tightened its rules recently, now requiring a demonstrated legal interest. Germany sits in between, open to notaries and to anyone who can show legitimate interest, but not to the general public. Three countries, three different answers, and the pattern repeats, with variations, across the rest of Europe.

The second is authorities and regulated intermediaries acting through a legitimate, defined channel: tax authorities, courts, anti-money-laundering checks, mutual assistance between states, a bank's own compliance team. This access exists by design, not by accident, and it is expanding as registers across Europe become more connected to each other, not shrinking.

The third is anyone with a specific legal relationship to you or the asset: a beneficiary entitled to inspect foundation documents, an heir challenging their entitlement, a creditor with an enforcement order. This is narrower than the second category, but it is not the same as having no access at all.

A foundation moves your name out of the first category. Hold a foreign property, a collection, or a holding through the foundation rather than in your own name, and a public search returns the foundation, not you. The foundation's own ownership sits in Liechtenstein's beneficial ownership register, which is not searchable by the public or by commercial databases. That is a genuine, structural change, and it is the entire reason this page exists.

It does nothing for the second category, and it was never going to. Liechtenstein discloses beneficial ownership to its own authorities and, through established mutual assistance frameworks, to foreign authorities making a legitimate request. Switzerland and Liechtenstein cooperate closely on exactly this basis. A foundation does not, and is not designed to, put assets beyond the reach of a tax authority, a court, or a properly constituted investigation.

It also does little for the third category. A beneficiary, an heir with a compulsory portion claim, or a creditor with an enforcement order has narrow but real routes to information that a member of the public simply does not have.

So: yes, a foundation gives you genuine distance from public and commercial visibility. No, it does not, and should not be expected to, give you distance from the state or from people with a legitimate claim on the structure itself.

Families set up a Liechtenstein foundation for succession planning, continuity across generations, and protection from the disputes that tend to surround significant wealth: creditor claims, divorce settlements, forced heirship rules that don't reflect what someone actually wants. Privacy is rarely why anyone starts this conversation, and it should not be the main reason anyone finishes it either.

It is, however, a genuine and welcome bonus once the structure exists for other reasons: an extra layer of discretion for those who value it, sitting on top of benefits that already justified the structure on their own. Treat it as a bonus, not as the foundation of the decision, and the rest of this page makes sense. Treat it as the main event, and you are likely setting up the wrong structure for the wrong reason.

A Liechtenstein foundation is not limited to holding property. It can hold securities, company shareholdings, art and collections, classic cars, yachts, and other tangible assets, and the same first-category logic applies to each.

Art and collectibles rarely sit on any public register in the first place, so there is less to gain here. The privacy benefit is smaller, while the succession and continuity benefits, keeping a collection intact across generations rather than dispersed at probate, tend to matter more.

Classic cars and yachts often do carry a public or semi-public registration trail, and structuring this correctly has its own rules that vary significantly by flag state and country of registration. This is a live and developing area, not a settled one, and specialist advice on the specific asset and jurisdiction matters more than general principles.

The same closer-to-home logic applies to Swiss company holdings. A GmbH shareholding is public in the Swiss commercial register by default; held through a foundation, your name should not appear there either. An AG shareholding is already private under Swiss law, so a foundation changes nothing for that entity type.

This is about foreign assets. Swiss residential property can't be held this way. Lex Koller, the federal law restricting foreign-controlled entities from acquiring Swiss residential real estate, applies to a Liechtenstein foundation exactly as it would to any other foreign-controlled entity, and it significantly restricts Swiss commercial property too. If your concern is specifically a Swiss home, a foundation will not be able to change its visibility. It stays in your name, in the land register, regardless of structure, and in most cantons that name is already searchable online without anyone needing a reason to look.

That isn't a gap to engineer around. It's a fair trade, because Switzerland already protects that record in a way few other countries protect anything.

Separately, Switzerland is introducing LETA, a federal transparency register for Swiss legal entities, expected to enter into force in mid-2026. It sits in the second category above: non-public, accessible to authorities and financial intermediaries, not a search tool for the public. It doesn't apply to a Liechtenstein foundation, which sits outside its scope as a Liechtenstein legal entity. Worth knowing if you hold Swiss companies directly, but it isn't the reason to think about privacy abroad. The patchwork in category one is.