Corporate data isn’t permanent. Companies vanish, registries update, and records are scrubbed.
Data usually disappears for one of three reasons:
- Evasion: Bad actors often wipe records to avoid sanctions or hide past scandals.
- Accidental loss: Data can disappear due to technical failure, environmental decay, or negligence.
- System updates: Some countries, such as Russia, use live corporate registries that overwrite records as data is updated.
Because data is so fragile, access to historical records is the only way to ensure a comprehensive risk management strategy.
Why are historical records important for risk management?
An incomplete picture of corporate entities makes it challenging to ensure regulatory compliance, maintain resilient supply chains, and adequately vet third parties.
Historical data helps organizations and regulators fill in gaps that result from deleted data and track relationships over time, which is crucial for investigating complex networks where entities may change details to hide illicit activities.
>> Learn how comprehensive data helps organizations obtain a full picture of risk <<
Examples: When corporate records disappear
Vanished Cambodian companies
A recent Whale Hunting podcast investigation identified multiple Cambodian companies that have been “vanished” from the nation’s corporate registry. These companies include an alleged front to move billions of dollars in illicit cash. All historical references to these businesses, including their banking activities and land deals, have been erased. Erasures like these significantly challenge analysts and investigators who rely on current corporate registry data for screening and enforcement.
Removed MCF designations in China
China’s use of military-civil fusion (MCF) funds and similar investment vehicles is part of a broader MCF program aimed at accelerating the modernization of its military. China’s objective is to support promising companies in the private sector that accelerate research and development while avoiding bureaucratic hurdles and economic inefficiencies.
Understanding MCF funds helps organizations identify Chinese military end users (MEUs) and their trade and investment relationships, which is critical for regulatory, legal, and economic risk management.
To avoid sanctions, some Chinese companies are now scrubbing “MCF” from their names and public records. If the registry doesn’t preserve previous names, this critical risk indicator is lost forever, making MCF funds more difficult to detect.
>> Learn how publicly available corporate records can help uncover Chinese MCFs <<
Expunged data in the Russian registry
Not all instances of data removal are a result of nefarious conduct. The Russian Federal Tax Registry — one of the most useful sources for obtaining company information in Russia — is a live database. Changes are reflected in real time, and preexisting data is expunged. Analysts and investigators can no longer see the information that was included before the change. This makes past relationships impossible to determine unless those previous records are somehow preserved.
How does Sayari capture historical data?
When a corporate entity removes data from its official records — for example, a Chinese company removing mention of MCF from its name — that data remains in any previous version of the record captured before the update or deletion. If you have access to those previous versions of a company’s disclosures, then it remains relatively simple to cross-reference those past records with how the company is representing itself today and make a determination on whether it remains a risk.
Sayari preserves historical data and relationships to provide comprehensive archiving of all data ingested into its tools. This ensures more complete information than corporate registries themselves can provide and delivers valuable insight into entities that have updated their public profiles in an effort to evade regulatory restrictions.
When Sayari ingests new data that supersedes existing information, Sayari marks old relationships as “former” rather than removing them, allowing for deep historical analysis. Most of the data registries from which Sayari collects do not maintain their own historical ledgers. Sayari Graph and other Sayari solutions capture data over time so organizations can look backwards and see those historical risk-relevant relationships before they were redacted.
To learn more about how Sayari data can help your team obtain a full picture of corporate entities and track these entities over time, view our Uncovering Chinese Military Companies webinar.
