Synthetic lease

A synthetic lease is a financing structure by which a company structures the ownership of an asset so that -

Effectively, the asset is owned indirectly by the lessee / operating company, and the company leases the asset to itself. The post-Enron rules of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which require some measure of independence of a special purpose entity from the operating company, and genuine economic substance to the transaction in which the SPE is a party, made it difficult or impossible to structure a synthetic lease SPE, so synthetic leases have essentially passed out of existence.