Research On The Legal Structure Of Life Insurance Trust In China

The essence of the legal relationship of life insurance trust is that the trust intervenes in the original insurance legal relationship,and the trust company replaces or directly assumes a specific role in the original insurance legal relationship.Because the insured can only be a natural person,in the legal relationship of life insurance trust,the trust company can act as an insurance beneficiary,policyholder,or both.Based on this,with the main body connecting the legal relationship between insurance and trust as the core,the life insurance trust is divided into the mandator-led model and the trustee-led model.In the former,the trust company is also the insurance beneficiary.The latter,trust company has the identity of insurance policyholder and insurance beneficiary.The eligibility judgment of the two models needs to start from their eligibility conditions,that is,whether the subject and object of the legal structure under the two models conform to the provisions of Insurance Law and Trust Law.Specifically,on the trust side,the Trust Law takes certainty,transferability,and property rights as the eligibility criteria for judging the subject matter of the trust.However,not only in theory,there are disputes over the right to claim insurance benefits,the right to benefit from insurance,and the ownership of insurance policies for the subject of life insurance trusts.In practice,only the identity of the insurance beneficiary obtained by the trust company is used as one of the elements for the effective establishment of the trust.There is no limit to who is the mandator in the original insurance legal relationship.This leads to some structural settings that disobey the nature and transfer requirements of the trust object.On the insurance side,the Insurance Law restricts the identity of policyholders and beneficiaries in the subject of insurance legal relations.Due to the controversy over the understanding of the scope of policyholders in Article 31 of the " Insurance Law",the suitability of trust companies as insurance policyholders is questionable.In practice,although the trust company acts as an insurance beneficiary,due to the legal structure of the life insurance trust,the ultimate ownership of the insurance fund is not the trust company,but the trust beneficiary.Therefore,the insurance trust substantially expands the ultimate beneficiaries of the policy and breaks through the limitations of the current law.Based on the above problems,this paper analyzes the elements of the legal structure of life insurance trust,that is,whether the subject and object of legal relationship meet the existing provisions,and whether there is a substantial deviation from the legal provisions after the nesting of trust and insurance.For the subject matter of the trust,the ownership of the policy is derived from the theory of property law in the common law system,and its essence is a kind of ownership.The insurance claim in China ’s " Insurance Law " emphasizes the creditor ’s rights attribute of the policy and the contract system with the insurance contract as the core.Therefore,policy ownership should not be the subject of life insurance trust in China.In terms of the relationship between the right to petition for insurance compensation and insurance beneficial right,the latter comes from the insured ’s right.The two are synonymous and do not need to be distinguished.Clarify that the subject matter of life insurance trust is the right to petition for insurance compensation,and then judge the eligibility of the right to petition for insurance compensation in the trust law.First of all,the subject matter of the trust is legally owned by the mandator.At this level,the insured and the beneficiary who has renounced the change are eligible trust mandators.In practice,the type of the insured as the trust mandator cannot meet the requirements.Secondly,the subject of the trust needs to meet the requirements of certainty.In this regard,the life insurance trust ensures the certainty of the occurrence of the insurance accident by limiting the docking insurance to life insurance and large annuity insurance,and guarantees the determination of the payment of the insurance by agreeing that the trust company obtains the identity of the irrevocable beneficiary of life insurance.Finally,in terms of the nature of the designation and change of the beneficiary of the insurance,it is the insured ’s right to transfer the insurance claim to others,which belongs to the transfer of creditor ’s rights and meets the transfer requirements.Regarding the issue of the ineligibility of the subject of the insurance legal relationship,although there is a dispute on the relationship between the ’ interest ’stipulated in the first paragraph of Article 31 of the ’ Insurance Law ’ and the ’ consent’ stipulated in the second paragraph,the legislation has made it clear that with the consent of the insured,it is considered to have an insurable interest,so under the trusteeled model,the trust company is eligible as an insured person.However,under the trustee-led model,the trust company establishes self-benefit insurance,that is,as an insured person,it has the identity of an insurance beneficiary.There is a risk that the trustee abuses the trust mechanism to transfer the insurance policy outward and the trust beneficiary evades the provisions of the insurance law on the beneficiary.In view of the existing problems,the external mode construction and internal subject norms should be carried out according to the eligibility of trust objects and participants.On the one hand,the right to claim insurance is affirmed as the object of trust.For the mandator-led model,reposition the subject qualification of the trust mandator,with the insured as the core,rather than the insured as the core.For the trustee-led model,it affirms the eligibility of the trustee as an insured person,but at the same time needs to establish a mechanism to prevent the trustee from abusing the policy.On the other hand,it regulates the participants of life insurance trust,mainly the beneficiaries and mandators of the trust.By means of penetrating supervision,during the existence of the insurance legal relationship,the trust beneficiary is the insurance beneficiary because the trust beneficiary is the ultimate subject of the insurance premium.In addition,the trust supervisor is agreed by the way of tripartite agreement.Under the client-led mode with the original insurance beneficiary as the mandator,the supervisor can be agreed to represent the interests of the trust beneficiary and supervise the transactional management activities implemented by the trustee.