How to check whether a ship is sanctioned

Step one: get the IMO number

Everything else depends on this. Vessel names repeat, change and get transliterated inconsistently; the seven-digit IMO number does not.

If you have only a name, resolve it first. Search this site, or a free ship-particulars source such as Equasis, and confirm the match against something structural: build year, deadweight, type. If two candidate hulls share a name, do not proceed until you know which one you have. Then verify the check digit so a transcription error does not send you down the wrong record.

Step two: check each authority separately

There is no single global list. Check the ones that matter for your exposure.

United States. Search the OFAC Sanctions List Search tool by IMO number. Vessel entries print the identifier as “Vessel Registration Identification IMO” followed by seven digits. Note the program tag in square brackets and any “Linked To” party.

United Kingdom. Search the UK Sanctions List. Ship entries carry a unique identifier, the regime name, the designation date and a statement of reasons.

European Union. This is where most people go wrong. The EU’s consolidated financial sanctions file lists asset-freeze targets, and the great majority of EU-listed shadow-fleet vessels are not in it, because their listing is a port and services ban under Article 3s. To check the EU properly you must read Annex XLII of the consolidated text of Regulation 833/2014 on EUR-Lex, or use a source that parses it.

If your exposure touches Switzerland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or Japan, check those lists too; they follow the G7 measures at their own pace and their coverage is not identical.

Step three: read the entry, do not just find it

A hit is the start of the work. Record:

• which authority listed the vessel, and under which program or regulation;
• the date of the designation;
• the stated reason, in the authority’s own words;
• what the measure prohibits — blocking, port entry, services — because they are not interchangeable;
• whether it is current, and if the vessel has been removed, when and by whom.

Step four: check the ownership chain

A vessel absent from every list can still be blocked in US terms if a designated person holds a property interest in it. So check the registered owner and, where the listing names one, the operator or manager. If the owner is designated and the hull is not, that is a serious finding, not a clean result.

Company names in official listings are printed inconsistently. Match on jurisdiction and registration number where they are given, and treat a name-only match as provisional.

Step five: write down what you checked

For any decision that might be reviewed later — a compliance file, a published article — record the source, the URL, the date and time, and what the entry said. Lists change daily. A screenshot with a timestamp is worth more than a memory of a clean search.

What each free source misses

OFAC search covers US lists only, and gives you the entry without the reasoning; the reason lives in the Recent Actions notice and press release of the designation date.

UK search is the most explicit about reasons but covers UK designations only.

EUR-Lex is authoritative for the EU but is a legal text, not a database: you are reading a consolidated regulation and finding a row in an annex, and the consolidated version can trail the latest amending regulation by days.

Commercial screening tools are convenient and can lag, and their handling of the EU port-ban list varies precisely because it is not in the financial sanctions file.

Ship-particulars databases such as Equasis and the IMO’s GISIS tell you about the hull, not about sanctions, and their terms permit manual lookups rather than bulk collection.

This site aggregates the three main lists nightly and links every fact to its source, which makes it useful for research and for a first pass. It is not a screening tool of record. For a compliance decision, go to the authority’s own list, which every page here links to.

A worked order of operations

1. Name → IMO number, verified against particulars.
2. IMO number → OFAC, UK, EU, plus any other regime relevant to you.
3. Entry → authority, date, program, stated reason, measure type, current status.
4. Owner and manager → the same checks again.
5. File the evidence with a timestamp.

If you are doing this against a deadline rather than for a compliance file, verifying a tanker story shows what the raw entries look like at each authority, which is usually the slowest part for someone doing it the first time.