The lease agreement does become a financial liability and corresponding asset when it commences. In this case the article is adding leases that haven’t started yet, so GAAP accounting rules prohibit it from being listed as a liability. As a result it’s disclosed in the notes. nb the typical US investor way to analyze it is to still not treat operating leases as debt, since the rent is already reducing the EBITDA (a proxy for cash flow before debt items are paid). The other way to do it is you add back the rent to your cash flow proxy and count the leases as debt. You end up in a similar place.