• Question ID: 2020/0007
• Date of publication: 31/01/2020
• Subject matter: Counterparty reference data, Special categories of counterparties
• AnaCredit Manual: Part II
• Data attribute: Address: country, Head office undertaking identifier

Question

Please clarify which address (country, street, etc.) and institutional sector should be reported in the case of embassies.

Answer

An embassy or a consulate (or a diplomatic mission in general) is the administrative personnel/a government agency of a state present in another state with a view to representing the sending state officially in the receiving state. A country may have several different types of diplomatic missions in another country. For example, a consulate or consulate general is a representative of the embassy in locales outside of the capital city. As well as being a diplomatic mission to the country in which it is situated, it may also be a non-resident permanent mission to one or more other countries. There are thus resident and non-resident embassies.

In cases where embassies or consulates are able to incur liabilities on their own behalf, to take on other obligations or further commitments and to enter into contracts, for example, when they receive a loan from an observed agent, they may be a counterparty in AnaCredit.

Since they are controlled by government, embassies or consulates and the sending state are deemed to have a relationship analogous (but not identical) to that of the foreign branches and domestic part of a legal entity. This means that embassies and consulates are reported to AnaCredit in a similar manner to foreign branches (cf. Section 12.2.2 in Part II of the Reporting Manual).

Specifically, an embassy has its own counterparty identifier, and the head office undertaking identifier is also registered with a view to identifying the sending state/general government (in line with the approach that the head office undertaking identifier is always registered if the counterparty is a foreign branch).

Moreover, the receiving state is reported under the data attribute “address: country” as the country of the embassy/consulate (i.e. the country in which the embassy is resident/where the consulate is located and where the work of the diplomatic mission is carried out).

Embassies or consulates come under the institutional sector central government under the public sector, which consists of all units resident in the economy (including a country’s own embassies inside the national frontiers of another country) that are controlled by government.