People, companies, vessels, and securities in OpenSanctions are associated with various forms of business risk: they could be designated on a sanctions list, linked to a crime, or be subject to enhanced scrutiny because they hold public office.
In order to determine the nature of the risk linked to an entity in OpenSanctions, you can rely on various forms of tags that detail the reason for the entity's inclusion in the database. This page explains how to find what you are looking for, and make sense of what you find.
Topics are used to classify entities and indicate why they are included in a dataset. They can be used to determine the level and type of risk they represent. Some key topics include:
| ID | Description |
|---|---|
sanction | Sanctioned entities: Companies, people, or other things that have been designated by a government in order to prohibit specific interactions with them. |
sanction.linked | Sanction-linked entities: Companies, people, or other things that have a direct relationship with a sanction or a sanction.control entity. This topic is a superset of sanction.control. |
sanction.control | Sanction-linked via ownership or control: Companies, assets, or other things that are direct or indirect subsidiaries of sanctioned entities. This topic applies irrespective of the percentage ownership stake the sanctioned entity holds in the subsidiary, and irrespective of how many layers down the ownership chain. |
sanction.counter | Counter-sanctioned entities: The database covers some sanctions lists from non-democratic countries which issue their own sanctions designations, often including pro-democracy activists, journalists, and human rights proponents (as well as Paul Wolfowitz). |
debarment | Debarred entities: Companies that have been excluded from public procurement, often because they previously committed fraud in their execution of a government contract. |
role.pep | Politically exposed persons: Currently or previously held a position of political influence. We document our global coverage and data methodology regarding PEPs. |
role.rca | Relatives and close associates: Family members and key business associates of politically exposed persons. They are often used as nominees or front-people when a PEP attempts to hide illicit financial gains. |
poi | Persons of interest: People where there is a public interest case for closer scrutiny, but who do not meet common definitions of a politically-exposed person and who are not sanctioned. |
reg.action | Regulatory action: Companies that have been the subject of an enforcement action by an industry regulatory body. |
reg.warn | Regulatory warning: Companies that have placed on a warning/alert list by an industry regulatory body. |
For a full list of topics, both risk-related and purely descriptive, see the topic type documentation.
PEP positions use a controlled topic vocabulary (gov.*, pol.*, role.diplo) to classify office-holders by role and jurisdiction, enabling risk-tiered filtering beyond the binary role.pep flag. For the full entity model, topic taxonomy, retention windows, and data sources, see the PEP methodology page.
The data is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution NonCommercial
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