Ultimate Beneficial owners

A person is the beneficial owner of a company if:

• He/she owns more than 25% (directly or indirectly) in the company.
• He/she is a beneficial owner in a company that controls company A (has more than 50% ownership).

A person is a beneficial owner of company A if:

• it owns more than 25% (directly or indirectly) in company A.
• it is the beneficial owner of a company that controls company A (has more than 50% ownership).

This relationship can go through any number of stages: If a person owns 51% of company C, which in turn owns 51% of company B, which in turn owns 51% of company A, the person only has 13.3% ownership in company A, but is still the beneficial owner.

Alternative beneficial owners

A person is an alternative beneficial owner in Company A if:

• he or she has 0.5 or more voting power in the company (see definition below).
• he or she through the presumed family's shares (in addition to its own) satisfies any of the three previous points.

For example: If a married couple owns 15% of shares in company A each, they will together control 30% of the company. Therefor, they fulfill the top point, and are considered alternative beneficial owners.

We base this on surname and address. If you have access to the National Register (Folkeregisteret) integration through Strise, we always check against the National Register.

Voting power

Who has the winning vote during a general meeting is often related to ownership stake in the company, but distribution of shares can still have a lot to say about the outcome. Voting power is an estimate of the proportion of voting situations a person can change by changing their vote.

A simple example is a company with three owners (A, B and C) who each have 33.3% of the shares. If B and C have voted yes, A will not be able to change the outcome, as the others have 66.6% combined. We get the same situation if B and C vote no.

If B and C vote differently (either yes and no, or no and yes, respectively) the situation is different. Now A will get his way. Therefore, A can change the outcome in 2/4 voting combinations, and A has 0.5 in voting power. The same of course applies to B and C as well.

A more advanced example is a case where we have 2,431 shares distributed among six shareholders. Everyone has 405 shares each (16.66%) with the exception of person A, who has 406 (16.701%). Person A therefore has a voting power of 0.625, while the rest of the shareholders have 0.25 each.

We won't show the whole calculation here, but the reason for this is that A only needs to cooperate with two other shareholders to have a majority. If three of the other shareholders were to cooperate, they would only have 49.98% of the votes.