Securities data in OpenSanctions

Our database contains multiple methods for making connections between companies and instruments described on sanctions lists, and asset information.

International Securities Identification Numbers (ISINs) are not the native language of the sanctions world: the vast majority of sanctioned companies are private, and do not issue tradeable securities. Instead, companies are more commonly identified by their name, jurisdiction and registration number on sanctions lists. The US Treasury does identify a very small set of ISINs/ticker symbols directly (see: search result, 238 at time of writing), as do the watchlist datasets published by Europe's ESMA.

Data sources

OpenSanctions expands the government-published sanctions lists with data from other sources. This way, we include securities definitions (and ISINs) from the following sources:

Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) is the coordinating body for the assignment of LEI codes. They also maintain a mapping of all companies who have an LEI code and the ISIN codes issued to those organizations. This is helpful with banks and large funds.
The National Settlement Depository (NSD) of the Russian Federation publishes information about the assignment of ISIN codes to Russian securities. These are subject to US Executive Order 14071.
The European Markets and Securities Authority (ESMA) publishes the Financial Instrument Reference Data Service - a data file of securities that have been traded on European markets - and two watchlists, which we've included in our database.
LSEG PermID are included to connect the entities to Refinitiv datasets. We include both the PermID and RIC (Reuters Instrument Code) identifiers.
We also enrich securities with OpenFIGI identifiers, which helps to easily link them with Bloomberg datasets.

We hope to add more sources to the system in the near future. If you wish to suggest a relevant dataset which we can legally include in OpenSanctions, please get in touch.

Data structure overview

On a technical note, OpenSanctions does not consider ISINs to be attributes of companies. Instead, each ISIN is assigned to a Security object, which in turn links to its issuer (a Company object).

To simplify this, we are publishing a CSV table export of all sanctioned companies (using the lists published by the US, EU, UK and Switzerland) with their securities identifiers - LEI, ISINs, RICs and PermIDs inlined for easier analysis.

We're happy to generate a other representations of this data upon request.

CSV format data dictionary

The simplified CSV exports are available for download here.

Column	Data type	Title	Description	Nullable	Multiple
`caption`	`name`	Company name	Preferred name of the company	no	no
`lei`	`identifier`	LEI code	Legal entity identifier assigned to the company	yes	yes
`perm_id`	`identifier`	PermID	LSEG/Refinitiv PermID identifier	yes	yes
`isins`	`identifier`	ISINs	Securites identifiers linked to all financial instruments associated with the company	yes	yes
`ric`	`identifier`	RIC	Reuters Instrument Code, similar to stock ticker symbol	yes	yes
`countries`	`country`	Jurisdiction	All country codes in which the company is known to be registered	yes	yes
`sanctioned`	`boolean`	Designated	The company is identified on a sanctions list, rather than being covered by a broader measure.	no	no
`eo_14071`	`boolean`	Investment ban	The company has issued securities which are affected by the EO 14071 investment ban	no	no
`public`	`boolean`	Listed	Data sources clearly indicate the company is publicly traded	no	no
`id`	entity	ID	OpenSanctions identifier for the given company	no	no
`url`	`url`	Web profile	OpenSanctions web profile for the given company	no	no
`datasets`	`dataset`	Source datasets	All sources from which information is included about this company	no	yes
`risk_datasets`	`dataset`	Risk source	The subset of sources that are watchlists.	yes	yes
`aliases`	`name`	Names	List of known names for the company, often in multiple spellings and alphabets.	no	yes
`references`	entity	Source IDs	Identifiers of the company derived from source datasets	no	yes

The CSV is formatted using , (comma) as a delimiter, encoded as utf-8.
Some fields in the CSV can contain multiple values in one cell. These are stored as a nested CSV using the ; (semicolon) delimiter.
Boolean values are given as t and f.

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Understanding the data

Entity structure

Data dictionary

Identifiers and de-duplication

Matcher training data

Statement-based data

Data enrichment