476
Opinion of the Court
ies are deemed to be the same as the parent corporation. The text of the FSIA gives no indication that Congress intended us to depart from the general rules regarding corporate formalities.
Where Congress intends to refer to ownership in other than the formal sense, it knows how to do so. Various federal statutes refer to "direct and indirect ownership." See, e. g., 5 U. S. C. § 8477(a)(4)(G)(iii) (referring to an interest "owned directly or indirectly"); 12 U. S. C. § 84(c)(5) (refer-ring to "any corporation wholly owned directly or indirectly by the United States"); 15 U. S. C. § 79b(a)(8)(A) (referring to securities "which are directly or indirectly owned, controlled, or held with power to vote"); § 1802(3) ("The term 'newspaper owner' means any person who owns or controls directly, or indirectly through separate or subsidiary corporations, one or more newspaper publications"). The absence of this language in 28 U. S. C. § 1603(b) instructs us that Congress did not intend to disregard structural ownership rules.
The FSIA's definition of instrumentality refers to a foreign state's majority ownership of "shares or other ownership interest." § 1603(b)(2). The Dead Sea Companies would have us read "other ownership interest" to include a state's "interest" in its instrumentality's subsidiary. The better reading of the text, in our view, does not support this argument. The words "other ownership interest," when following the word "shares," should be interpreted to refer to a type of interest other than ownership of stock. The statute had to be written for the contingency of ownership forms in other countries, or even in this country, that depart from conventional corporate structures. The statutory phrase "other ownership interest" is best understood to accomplish this objective. Reading the term to refer to a state's interest in entities lower on the corporate ladder would make the specific reference to "shares" redundant. Absent a statutory text or structure that requires us to depart from normal rules of construction, we should not construe the statute in
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