What’s in a Name?
Probably the hardest part of effective due diligence comes when you are dealing with clients from jurisdictions where naming conventions can vary substantially to your own.
In many Spanish language speaking countries the entities family name can be a combination of both mother’s and father’s family names. This can be optional and for due diligence and can be highly misleading. This was illustrated perfectly in the US Senate report on Riggs bank where Augusto Pinochet’s bank accounts had numerous name variations. His full name was: Augosto Jose Ramon Pinochet Ugarte, his parents names were Augusto Pinochet Vera and Avelina Ugarte Martínez. In the report they list numerous bank accounts with various name combinations such as:
Augusto P. Ugarte, A. Ugarte, A P Ugarte, Jose Pinochet, Jose P Ugarte
Other problems that we frequently encounter arise from transliteration of names. Transliteration “is the general process of converting characters from one script to another, where the result is roughly phonetic for languages in the target script” eg Cyrillic, Arabic, Slavic, Chinese or Thai. On transliteration various letters can change which causes an enormous amount of confusion for due diligence teams and sanctioning bodies alike. Muhammed can have hundreds of transliterated versions eg Mohammad, Mohamed, Muhamad, Mohammed etc. Arabic names have caused all sorts of complications with sanctions lists with different government departments holding different spellings of names for the same entity. There is currently no globally agreed transliteration format.
Understanding the naming conventions of the territories where you do business is key in performing thorough due diligence on them.
Find out more:
www.bankersonline.com/tools/namingconventions.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_name
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_name
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_in_the_Russian_Empire,_Soviet_Union_and_CIS_countries
Topics: Country Risk Due Diligence
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Member Comments
Simon Blackmore, 11 Aug 2009 10:16
There is a very useful guide produced by the UK Government titled "A Guide To Names And Naming Practices". It is available to be downloaded free of charge from the Financial And Banking Information Infrastructure Committee's website at;
http://www.fbiic.gov/public/2008/nov/Naming_practice_guide_UK_2006.pdf
Anonymous, 17 Aug 2009 09:08
Thanks Simon that's a fantastically useful document.
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