With the growth of capital market, the shareholding structure of companies has become more complex. Direct ownership is easily recognizable through companies’ shareholders information, however with the formation of cross shareholding among companies, a kind of indirect and complex shareholding has emerged which is not observable. The primary owners (original owners) can take over other companies through intermediate owners. In this research a model is presented to identify and investigate the structure of indirect ownership. Identifying the hidden ownership relations together with determining the level of complexity of network and the degree of ownership concentration are among the capabilities of this model. To this end, the ownership network of Tehran Stock Exchange in June 2014 was analyzed. The results indicate that over 86 percent of all observed ownership relations have been formed by indirect ownership and at least with the presence of one intermediate owner. Moreover, 15.35 percent of the market’s total value (equals with 547 thousands billion Rials) was calculated twice and also studying the degree of concentration of ownership indicates that over 60 percent of the market’s total value belongs to only 10 percent of the shareholders. JEL Classifications: L16, G32
