blog/data/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway.txt

   1 Title: Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure
   2 Tags: english, offentlig innsyn
   3 Date: 2015-06-15 14:00
   4
   5 <p>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
   6 in Norway.  The information is publicly available, but one need to
   7 recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
   8 ownership graph of a given set of companies.  To save me the work in
   9 the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
  10 ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format.  The data source
  11 is web scraping from <a href="http://www.proff.no/">Proff</a>, because
  12 I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
  13 the ownership data, <a href="http://www.brreg.no/">Brønnøysundsregistrene</a>.</p>
  14
  15 <p>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
  16 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph">the code from git</a> and run it using the organisation number.  I'm
  17 using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
  18 ownership structure is very simple:</p>
  19
  20 <pre>
  21 % time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot
  22
  23 real    0m2.841s
  24 user    0m0.184s
  25 sys     0m0.036s
  26 %
  27 </pre>
  28
  29 <p>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
  30 allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image.  The
  31 resulting dot file for the example above look like this.  The edges
  32 are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
  33 organisation number as their name and the name as the label:</p>
  34
  35 <pre>
  36 digraph ownership {
  37 rankdir = LR;
  38 "Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
  39 "910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
  40 "998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
  41 "974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
  42 "958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
  43 "998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
  44 "974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
  45 "910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
  46 }
  47 </pre>
  48
  49 <p>To view the ownership graph, run "<tt>dotty dagbladet.dot</tt>" or
  50 convert it to a PNG using "<tt>dot -T png dagbladet.dot >
  51 dagbladet.png</tt>".  The result can be seen below:</p>
  52
  53 <img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png" width="80%">
  54
  55 <p>Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect
  56 data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
  57 registered in the official company register for Norway.  The ownership
  58 register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
  59 of the ownership links.</p>
  60
  61 <p>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
  62 The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.</p>
  63
  64 <p>Update 2015-06-15: Since the initial post I've been told that
  65 "<a href="http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/13624518-3/">Aller
  66 Holding A/S</a>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
  67 have a Norwegian organisation number.  I've also been told that there
  68 is a <a href="http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/">web
  69 services API available</a> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
  70 willing to accept the terms or pay the price.</p>