Cite as: 507 U. S. 490 (1993)
Syllabus
owners, since payment to a record owner discharges all of an issuer's obligations to the beneficial owner under the Uniform Commercial Code, which is the law in all 50 States and the District of Columbia. Instead, an intermediary serving as the record owner is the "debtor" insofar as it has a contractual duty to transmit distributions to the beneficial owner. Unlike an issuer, it remains liable should a "lost" beneficial owner reappear to collect distributions due under such a contract. The Master thus erred in concluding that the issuer is the relevant "debtor," and Delaware's and New York's exceptions in this regard are sustained. Pp. 500-505. (d) Precedent, efficiency, and equity dictate rejection of the second major premise underlying the Master's recommendation: his proposal to locate a corporate debtor in the jurisdiction of its principal domestic executive offices rather than in the State of its incorporation. This sua sponte proposal would change the Court's longstanding practice under Texas and Pennsylvania. Moreover, as the Court recognized in Texas, supra, at 680, the proposal would leave too much for decision on a case-by-case basis. The mere introduction of any factual controversy over the location of a debtor's principal executive offices needlessly complicates an inquiry made irreducibly simple by Texas' adoption of a test based on the State of incorporation. Finally, the proposal cannot survive independent of the Master's erroneous decision to treat the issuers as the relevant "debtors." The arguably arbitrary decision to incorporate in one jurisdiction bears no less on a company's business activities than the equally arbitrary decision to locate its principal offices in another jurisdiction, and there is no inequity in rewarding a State whose laws prove more attractive to firms that wish to incorporate. Thus, Delaware's exception to the Master's proposal in this regard is sustained. Pp. 505-507. (e) New York's exception to the Master's application of the primary rule is overruled. New York contends that many of the disputed funds need not be escheated under the secondary rule because a statistical analysis of the relevant transactions on the books of the debtor brokers reveals creditor brokers, virtually all of whom have New York addresses. This proposal rests on the dubious supposition that the relevant "creditors" under the primary rule are other brokers, whereas this Court has already held that "creditors" are the parties to whom the intermediaries are contractually obligated to deliver unclaimed securities distributions. Moreover, the exception must fail because the Court rejected a practically identical proposal in Pennsylvania, supra, at 214- 215. On remand, however, if New York or one of the other claimant States can prove on a transaction-by-transaction basis that the creditors who were owed particular distributions had last known addresses within
491
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