Hong Kong's ship registry is Paris- and Tokyo-MoU white-listed and clean. Its company registry sits in the OFAC linked network of 102 sanctioned vessels — 72 distinct Hong Kong entities. The exposure is in the corporate layer, and you only see it if you walk the ownership chain.
Source: US Treasury OFAC Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list as of 4 June 2026 (list published 2 June 2026) — SDN.CSV from sanctionslistservice.ofac.treas.gov.
Methodology: For each of the 1,493 designated vessels, every name in its OFAC Linked To: remark is resolved to its own SDN record. The vessel is counted when a linked record is a company carrying a registration field tagged (Hong Kong) — Business Registration / Company Number / Commercial Registry / C.R. No. / Certificate of Incorporation — matched within a single remark fragment so a registration number is never misjoined to a Hong Kong address elsewhere. Individuals' passports and national IDs are excluded.
Flag context: the Hong Kong flag is on the white list of both the Paris and Tokyo MoUs (detention rates 1.5% / 1.2%); only 12 of 1,493 designated vessels fly it. This Brief is about company incorporation, not the flag.
Reproduce: re-pull SDN.CSV from the source URL above and re-run scripts/hk-tonnage-brief.ts from the ArcNautical repo. The dataset linked above carries every entity, SDN id and registration number.
Contact: Madhav · [email protected] — happy to discuss methodology or share the underlying calculation.