Pre-signing integrity checks on the target, the people signing for it, and whoever is investing alongside you.
Financial and legal diligence tells you what the target has agreed to. Integrity diligence tells you who you are agreeing with — and that is the part most commonly skipped on mid-market deals, where a full investigative engagement costs more than the deal team is willing to spend on a maybe.
The exposures that survive a clean data room are reputational and structural: an owner who does not appear on the cap table, a prior enterprise dissolved under a lien, an undisclosed settlement with a regulator, litigation running in a jurisdiction nobody thought to search in the local language.
Pre-signing decisions need the analysis, not just the flag: litigation and enforcement history read in context, ownership mapped through the holding layers, political exposure assessed, and a written reputational-risk memo you can put in front of an investment committee. Level A is the right call for an early screen across a long list; Level C adds supply-chain data and discreet source inquiries where the file stays thin.
Undisclosed 2022 regulatory settlement, and beneficial ownership overlapping a dissolved entity with lien history. No sanctions or watchlist matches across OFAC, EU, UN or UK lists.
Registry coverage and filing quality vary by jurisdiction, and some corporate records, court dockets and credit files sit behind paid databases or require an in-person pull. Every report states what was searched, what was not found, and what remains behind a paywall or needs a human retrieval — absence of a record is never treated as exoneration.