It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies +in Norway. The information is publicly available, but one need to +recursively look up ownership in all owners to figure out the complete +ownership graph of a given set of companies. To save me the work in +the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the +ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format. The data source +is web scraping from Proff, because +I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of +the ownership data, Brønnøysundsregistrene.
+ +To get a owner ship graph, fetch +the code from git and run it using the organisation number. I'm +using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its +ownership structure is very simple:
+ ++% time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot + +real 0m2.841s +user 0m0.184s +sys 0m0.036s +% ++ +
The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line, +allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image. The +resulting dot file for the example above look like this. The edges +are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the +organisation number as their name and the name as the label:
+ +
+digraph ownership {
+rankdir = LR;
+"Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
+"910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
+"998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
+"974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
+"958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
+"998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
+"974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
+"910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
+}
+
+
+To view the ownership graph, run "dotty dagbladet.dot" or +convert it to a PNG using "dot -T png dagbladet.dot > +dagbladet.png". This is the result can be seen below:
+ +
+
+Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect +data in the official ownership register, as that name is not +registered in the official company register for Norway. The ownership +register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking +of the ownership information.
+ +Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources. +The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.
+