Due Diligence
Know exactly who you are doing business with.
Screening tools tell you whether a name appears on a list. Our due diligence tells you who really owns, controls and benefits from a company, how its people have behaved, and what exposure you inherit if you sign.
- Typical duration
- 5 to 15 business days, by depth
- Urgent tasking
- Red-flag screen within 48 hours
- Coverage
- Corporate and court registries in 140+ jurisdictions
- Team
- Lead analyst, regional and language specialists and a red-team reviewer
- Deliverable
- Tiered report with ranked red flags, ownership chart and sourced annexes
- Pricing
- Fixed fee per subject and depth tier
When to call us
Before you sign, invest, appoint or onboard.
The cost of due diligence is small next to the cost of a counterparty you did not understand. We are brought in when the stakes are high, the structure is opaque or the screening result raises more questions than it answers.
Mergers and acquisitions
Targets, sellers and their management, including the history and relationships that never appear in a data room.
Investments and co-investors
Fund managers, co-investors and portfolio companies in markets where ownership is hard to see from the outside.
Agents and intermediaries
Distributors, consultants and introducers in high-risk markets, where hidden relationships create bribery and sanctions exposure.
Senior hires and board seats
Executives and directors whose undisclosed directorships, litigation or public conduct could become your problem.
Enhanced customer due diligence
High-risk and high-value clients for banks, payment firms and wealth managers, investigated beyond the onboarding file.
Sanctions and trade exposure
Counterparties, vessels and end users checked for ownership links and trading patterns that screening against lists alone will miss.
What you receive
Red flags first. Evidence for every one.
Our reports lead with what could stop or change the deal, ranked by severity, and support every finding with a captured source and a stated confidence level.
- An executive summary with an overall risk rating and the red flags that drive it
- An ownership and control chart traced to the ultimate beneficial owner
- Litigation, regulatory and adverse media history, researched in local languages
- Sanctions, export control and politically exposed person exposure, including through ownership
- Undisclosed interests, directorships and related parties of key individuals
- Clear statements of what could not be verified, and why
How it runs
Depth matched to the decision.
We offer three depths: a red-flag screen, a standard review and an enhanced investigation. We recommend the tier at scoping and tell you early if findings justify going deeper.
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01 / Scope
Day 1
We agree the subjects, the depth tier and the decisions the report must support, and confirm the deadline your transaction runs to.
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02 / Map
Days 1 to 5
Registry, court, property and filing research builds an ownership and control chart, layer by layer, to the people at the top.
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03 / Investigate
Days 3 to 10
Conduct, media, sanctions and network research in local languages, focused on the people and entities the map exposes.
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04 / Report
Days 8 to 15
Red-team review of every material finding, then a tiered report and a debrief with your deal, legal or compliance team.
Tradecraft
How we see through a structure.
Opaque ownership is designed to defeat a quick search. It rarely survives a patient one. These are the techniques our due diligence analysts use on every enhanced review.
- Registry archaeologyHistoric filings, officer changes and share transfers reveal who controlled a company before the current structure was put in place.
- Nominee detectionMass directorships, shared formation agents, identical filing patterns and registered offices that host hundreds of companies.
- Local-language researchRegional press, court records and filings read by native speakers in 41 languages, not summarized by machine translation.
- Vessel and aircraft trackingTransponder history, port calls, ship-to-ship transfers, flag changes and registered ownership of fleets and aircraft.
- Sanctions by ownershipOwnership aggregated across layers and tested against sanctions lists, including variant spellings and transliterations of names.
- Digital footprint of key peopleUndisclosed side businesses, affiliations and public statements of executives, directors and shareholders.
- Litigation and procurementCourt dockets, insolvency notices, debarment lists and public contract awards that show how a company really behaves.
- Published leak archivesPublicly searchable archives of previously published offshore records, reviewed for mentions of subjects and their associates.
Results
Diligence that changed the deal.
Good due diligence does not always stop a transaction. Often it changes the terms, the structure or the price.
Private equity
The shareholder who was not there
Eleven shell entities across four jurisdictions hid a beneficial owner linked to a sanctioned individual, three weeks before signing.
They told us on day one what open sources could and could not prove. Then they proved more than we expected, and every claim in the report traced back to a preserved source.
Questions
Due diligence FAQ
How is this different from screening software?
Screening checks names against lists. It cannot tell you who sits behind a nominee director, whether a match is really your subject, or what a company did before it changed its name. Our analysts answer those questions and document how they did it.
Which depth do we need?
A red-flag screen suits lower-risk third parties and early-stage deals. A standard review suits most counterparties and senior hires. An enhanced investigation suits acquisitions, high-risk markets and anything with opaque ownership. We recommend a tier at scoping and explain why.
Do you interview sources or make discreet calls?
No. We are an open-source firm and we never use pretext calls or misrepresent who we are. Where human inquiries would add value, we say so, and your counsel can decide whether to commission them separately.
What about jurisdictions with poor public records?
We tell you at scoping what is realistically available. Where registries are thin, we work from courts, procurement data, media, vessel and trade records and the digital footprint of the people involved, and we state clearly which findings could not be verified.
Can you meet a transaction deadline?
Usually. A red-flag screen can be delivered within 48 hours, and we will stage findings so that material issues reach your deal team as soon as they are confirmed, not at the end.
Start an engagement
Bring us the question nobody else could answer.
Tell us what you need to know and why. A senior investigator will scope it with you, tell you candidly what open sources can and cannot establish, and propose a plan with a fixed fee and a firm timeline.