In July last year, part of a Manhattan landmark changed hands. A stake in One Liberty Plaza, the ageing former US Steel building that looms over a park once occupied by antiWall Street activists, was quietly purchased by a Texas life insurer. A rare transaction in a moribund market for office towers, it received little publicity because the building’s ultimate owner, Canada’s Brookfield Corporation, was both the buyer and the seller.

One of the world’s largest and most complex conglomerates, Brookfield sold property to itself like this dozens of times in 2024, using $1.4bn from its insurance arm to finance transactions that supported its “distributable earnings” — a non-standard measure of profit that underpins the corporation’s $90bn stock market valuation. These earnings were then recycled back into the portfolio in a circular flow of cash that is attracting scrutiny of both the relative opacity of Brookfield’s accounting practices and how it juggles its vast global portfolio of real estate.

The transactions pose questions about the quality of Brookfield Corporation’s earnings, and the valuation of assets held to pay annuity policies at the Brookfield-owned insurance businesses that trade with other parts of the conglomerate.

They also raise the question of whether Brookfield and chief executive Bruce Flatt are presenting a sufficiently transparent picture of the organisation — a labyrinth containing thousands of entities, the interconnected funds, partnerships, trusts and companies that control $1tn of assets.

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