Data Methodology

This page describes how the data behind company, person and country profiles is produced. It is deliberately specific about limits: a transparency page that only lists strengths is marketing.

Turning records into companies

A sanctions list and a company register describe the same firm in different words. Combining them is the core of this platform, and getting it wrong means attributing one company’s sanctions to another — so the rules are conservative:

• Two records merge automatically only when they share an identifier — a registration number, tax ID, LEI or filing number — of the same type, in the same country.
• A close name match never merges anything on its own. It queues a suggestion for review, scored against the other record, and waits.
• For people the bar is higher still: no name match, however exact, is ever approved automatically. Officer records carry only a name, role and country — no birth date, no national ID — so two different people sharing a name is an ordinary occurrence, not an edge case. Every merge is a human decision.
• A decision, once made, stands: a pair a reviewer has separated is never proposed again.

Sanctions: dated, and reversible

Sanctions authorities publish complete lists, so a listing that stops appearing has been lifted. Each listing therefore carries the date its source last confirmed it, and a listing that disappears from a fresh list is marked as lifted rather than deleted — a company that was delisted is a different fact from one that was never listed, and only one of those is fair to the company.

This inference is only made against a source that publishes its list in full. Where an interface caps how much can be retrieved at once, absence proves nothing and no listing is ever marked lifted from it. A partial download otherwise looks exactly like a mass delisting, which is a mistake worth engineering against rather than apologising for.

Country Health score

A composite of World Bank and IMF indicators: income per person at purchasing-power parity, the size of the economy, inflation, unemployment, five-year growth, government debt and the current account. Each part is scored on a fixed scale, the weighted result is ranked across countries, and the method is versioned, so a change in it is visible rather than silent. Sanctions are not part of it; they have their own layer. Every component is stored and shown — the score is never a single number without its parts. Where a country’s data is thin, the score reflects fewer inputs; it is an indicator, not a verdict.

What we do not claim

• Coverage is uneven. Ownership data exists only where a register publishes it, and for most sanctioned companies it does not.
• Company locations on the map are country-level. Points are spread within a country for legibility and are not real addresses.
• Company names are recorded as their source spells them, including transliterations. The same firm can still appear more than once where no shared identifier exists yet.
• None of this is legal or compliance advice. Before acting on anything here, check the original source — which is why every profile links to it.