Connecting beneficial ownership, PEPs and sanctions data with OpenScreening

Millions of open data records can now be explored using a tool to help uncover hidden relationships between beneficial owners, politicians, sanction targets, and networks of companies.

OpenScreening is the product of collaboration between OpenSanctions, Linkurious, and Open Ownership. It demonstrates the value of combining high-quality, global, open datasets to aid investigations into sanctioned individuals and politically exposed persons (PEPs).

You can sign up and test the OpenScreening tool for free at: https://resources.linkurious.com/openscreening.

How it works

This proof of concept tool incorporates beneficial ownership data from the Open Ownership Register, published via our data analysis tools, and creates a graph database to match beneficial owners to names appearing in sanctions data from OpenSanctions, or in leaked beneficial ownership data from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

It is further enriched by data from the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation, Registrar of Companies and Intellectual Property in Cyprus, RuPEP’s Public Database of PEPs in Russia and Belarus, Russia’s Unified State Register of Legal Entities (EGRUL) and Ukraine’s Consolidated State Registry.

One of Open Ownership’s guiding principles is that producing beneficial ownership data which is structured allows it to be more easily analysed and linked with other datasets. This enhances its ability to expose transnational networks of illicit financial flows and support effective and timely due diligence.

Sanctions screening has become increasingly challenging given the pace with which new sanctions have been imposed on individuals and companies since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. By using the most up-to-date and comprehensive data, companies and individuals can seek to avoid doing business with sanctioned entities by better understanding their networks and how they appear in beneficial ownership chains.

Exposing, and then analysing, beneficial ownership information is widely recognised as an essential part of the process of tackling corruption, preventing and investigating tax evasion, protecting national security, and creating sustainable trading environments.

To create OpenScreening, Open Ownership’s beneficial ownership data has been converted to the FollowTheMoney data model used by OpenSanctions and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

To make this data easy to navigate, OpenScreening harnesses Linkurious’ graph technology and visualisation platform which is used by investigators and journalists around the world. Linkurious’ advanced tools also allow people to create queries which generate alerts - for example, letting a user know whenever new people are found who are connected to specific sanctioned entities.

We are indebted to the teams at OpenSanctions who have done the work to convert this data, and Linkurious for powering the service by utilising their graph data visualisation and analytics software.