# Can sanction.control sustain itself through ownership loops?

**URL:** <https://discuss.opensanctions.org/t/can-sanction-control-sustain-itself-through-ownership-loops/390>\
**Category:** Support & Questions\
**Created:** [November 5, 2026, 7:12am UTC](https://discuss.opensanctions.org/t/can-sanction-control-sustain-itself-through-ownership-loops/390 "2026-11-05T07:12:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Zishan\_101](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/858c86/32.png) [@Zishan\_101](https://discuss.opensanctions.org/u/Zishan_101)\
**Post date:** [November 5, 2026, 7:12am UTC](https://discuss.opensanctions.org/t/can-sanction-control-sustain-itself-through-ownership-loops/390/1 "2026-11-05T07:12:48Z")

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Hi all,

I’m building a portfolio project on the OpenSanctions bulk data (Databricks, snapshot from 30 October 2026). Part of it rebuilds the ownership walk myself so I can compare it with the `sanction.control` topic. The match is very close, and I’d like to understand the small gap.

**What I did**

- Started from every listed entity (topic `sanction`).
- Followed Ownership links downward, any percentage, any depth.
- Used only current links (no end date, or an end date after the snapshot), following the note in the [sanction.control article](https://www.opensanctions.org/articles/2026-08-13-sanction-control/) that an end date on a shareholding stops the chain.

**What I found**

- 29,150 companies carry `sanction.control` without being listed themselves. My walk reaches 29,083 of them (99.8%).
- 67 are tagged but not reached, and all 67 can only be reached through links that have an end date.
- The ended links are 16 shareholdings from the Russian EGRUL registry, all with full end dates: 5 ended between 2022 and 2025, and 11 in July 2026.
- 12 of the 14 companies directly below those ended links still carry the tag.
- 66 of the 67 are part of, or owned through, a pair of companies that own each other (A owns part of B, B owns part of A).
- I checked one on the live site: it still shows the tag next to the ended shareholdings, with data from late October, so it doesn’t look like a timing issue.

**My guess (please correct me)**

```auto
Listed owner --x--> A (stake ended)
                    A <--> B (A and B own each other)
                    B ---> C (C still tagged)

```

If tagged companies pass the tag on to what they own, a pair that owns each other could keep both companies tagged after the link from the listed owner has ended: A keeps B tagged, and B keeps A tagged. My walk starts fresh from listed entities on every run, so a loop can’t keep itself going in my version.

**Questions**

1. Is the tag recomputed from listed entities on each run, or can companies that are already tagged feed it?
2. Is this the expected behaviour for ownership loops, or a known edge case?

I’m happy to share the specific entity IDs privately if that helps. Thanks for the data and for the write-up on the new topic.

_Edit: corrected the counts. 4 companies I first counted as having no path were old rows in my own table, not an issue in your data._