REVERSE DILIGENCE, INSTRUCTED BY COUNSEL
Understand your exposure.See what they already see.
Independent review of ownership, control and exposure for internationally structured families, their businesses and their counsel.
Corporate interests. Financial connections. Legal proceedings. Adverse media. Everything a desk can find on you. Before it does.
The problem
A decline, with no reason.
The asymmetry this exists to close
Most of the world's largest institutions screen clients against the same handful of commercial databases and public registers, continuously, and they re-run those checks at every periodic review. The subject of the screening is never shown the result. Decisions arrive stripped of their reasons, and the gap between what a principal believes is private and what is already on a public register is where the damage sits.
Assembled about you
- Commercial screening and adverse-media databases
- Consolidated sanctions and politically-exposed-person lists
- Beneficial-ownership and company registers
- Property and overseas-entity registers
- Trust registration records
- Court, judgment and insolvency records
- Published leak databases
- Former directorships and dissolved companies, retained indefinitely
What you are told
- An application declined, with no reason given
- A periodic review that goes quiet for six months
- A relationship closed by letter, at notice
- A request for documents nobody will explain
Neither the institution nor its vendor is obliged to tell a principal which record caused the outcome. In practice, most never do.
What we do
The work, in four parts
What a review covers
Sentry Diligence maps your structure in full, people, entities, assets, accounts, counterparties and the holdings you no longer own, then tests it from the outside, using the same sources an institution would. Scattered records across a dozen registers become one documented picture of what is visible, what is reachable, and what breaks.
What is already visible
What the lists, registers and archives return on every name in the structure, including former directorships and dissolved companies nobody thinks about any more, and false matches that have never been discounted.
Whether the structure holds
Whether entities survive the shell and substance tests applied to them, whether assets you have given away are still controlled by you on the documents, and whether a trustee or corporate-services provider is a single point of failure.
Who can reach the assets
Spouses under the governing matrimonial regime, creditors under guarantees and pledges signed years ago, claimants under unsatisfied judgments, and what stops entirely if you cannot act for six weeks.
What breaks under pressure
Single bank, single signatory, single jurisdiction. Tax residence tested against each country’s own rule rather than the certificate you hold. The durability of the citizenships your structure assumes. And the trail each remediation step leaves behind it.
The method
Sixteen tests in four families
Visibility
What others can already establish without the client's cooperation.
Screening, Proximity, Transparency and History
Structure
Whether the paper holds when it is tested.
Substance, Control and Provider
Claims
Who can reach the assets, and through which instrument.
Matrimonial, Encumbrance, Litigation and Succession
Resilience
What breaks, and in what order, when one fact changes.
Concentration, Residence, Status, Physical and Trail
Every finding comes back as a numbered line: what a third party can establish today, what it costs if it bites, and who fixes it.
Who instructs us
Private client counsel
Lawyers who need a client's actual position mapped before an application is filed, a structure is amended or a defence is prepared. You instruct, the work product is yours, and privilege attaches to it. Remediation stays with you.
Family offices and principals
Single and multi-family offices carrying structures that have never been mapped end to end — frequently inherited by a general counsel or chief investment officer who did not build them.
Trustees and relationship managers
Where an onboarding or a periodic review has stalled and nobody can say precisely why. The object is a file that answers the questions put to it, not one that avoids them.