Find Politically Exposed Persons worldwide

What are Politically Exposed Persons?#

Politically exposed persons (PEP) is a term from the financial services industry to describe individuals who have been entrusted with a prominent public function. This includes members of cabinets, parliaments, senior public servants and military personnel, or managers of state-owned companies.

The concept of PEPs is important because office-holders and members of their families must be the subject of enhanced public scrutiny to avoid risks like corruption, bribery, and the abuse of state funds. Identifying PEPs and conducting enhanced due diligence on the origins of their wealth is mandated by financial crime laws in most countries.

A word of caution:  Being classified as a PEP does not imply any misconduct. It is a risk category, not an allegation — see what classification means.

Our take on PEPs#

The identification of politically exposed persons is a more involved process than the aggregation of government-issued watchlists. "Exposed" status within countries is not universally defined and most countries do not maintain official databases of PEPs. This means that for many positions, a broad range of government websites must be consulted to identify office holders.

To address this challenge, we follow these principles:

• Transparency: we operate EveryPolitician.org, an open, global catalog of politically exposed people that invites contributions to expand coverage.
• Consistency: we have defined a data-driven methodology for the collection of PEP data. In short: we identify and classify political positions in national, international and regional governments, and track the individuals who hold them.
• Automation: we focus on automating the collection of PEP data where possible, and rely on a community-driven approach where list data is not available.

How do I use the data?#

You can use our PEP data in various ways, depending on your needs. For integration guidance — dataset selection, topic filtering, and properties to examine in matched results — see using PEP data.

• Explore EveryPolitician.org: our political world map lets you explore the government of every country, with information about the office holders and their positions.
• Integrate the API: you can also access our PEP data through our programming interface. This is ideal for screening and matching (demo), which lets you check the risk status of counterparties in real-time.
• Fetch the bulk data: our PEP data is also available as part of the OpenSanctions dataset. The use of bulk data is subject to the terms of the OpenSanctions bulk data license. We do not offer a separate licensing option for PEPs data alone.

Where is the data sourced from?#

OpenSanctions automatically monitors and imports global databases into our data, such as lists of world leaders or national parliaments. We are constantly expanding our coverage of nationally published data, such as lists of parliamentarians or state governors.

Official sources are government authorities and inter-governmental agencies. Non-official sources are community, civil-society or journalistic organisations.

How can I help?#

If you want to help map out political positions and their office holders, please check out the EveryPolitician.org contribution guide.