What is an exploration permit?
An exploration permit (undersökningstillstånd) gives a company the right to look for metals or minerals within a defined area of Sweden, normally for three years. The permit does not grant the right to mine; that requires a mining concession (bearbetningskoncession), which is assessed separately and to a considerably stricter standard. Permits are decided by Bergsstaten (the mining inspectorate), which is part of Sveriges geologiska undersökning (SGU, the Geological Survey of Sweden).
Sources we work with as a matter of routine
- Bergsstaten's open data: every granted and pending exploration permit, with its geographic data, case number and holder. Pulled as GeoPackage files and updated daily in our own archive and on our map site gruvkartor.se.
- Bolagsverket's bulk register: baseline information on every Swedish limited company (registered office, board, registration date, line of business). We take both the free bulk feed and, where needed, individual extracts from the e-service.
- The register of beneficial owners (verkliga huvudmän): who ultimately owns or controls a company. Pulled as individual extracts when we have a specific question. As a newspaper we have the right to access this information as part of our work, but it is personal data, so we are always careful about what we share.
- SGU's mineral resource database: historical test drilling, known deposits, geological maps.
- The Sami Parliament's reindeer husbandry register: sameby (Sami village) areas, reindeer grazing lands and national interests for reindeer herding.
- Lantmäteriet's topography: map and elevation data, for both print and web maps.
For foreign parent companies and investors we use ASIC (Australia), Companies House (UK), SEDAR+ (Canada) and similar foreign company registers. If the company is publicly listed there is also a lot it is required to publish and be transparent about. If it is on its way to an IPO, a great deal of new information is released for the first time.
For information on the companies themselves, the companies' own websites are an important source : for what they write, what they don't write, and how they change the page over time.
What we have to pay for
Some of Bolagsverket's material is only available for a fee, for instance personal details on board members, complete historical change filings, or original foreign extracts. We buy those records when it's justified for a specific investigation, never as routine. Keeping costs in check matters.
Data security
Our research happens in a separate workspace from publication. That means raw data we ingest (bulk registers, email correspondence, OCR'd PDFs, personal identity numbers) never goes straight to the web. Before anything crosses into the publishing repo, Pär does a manual review:
- Names of people who aren't relevant to the story are removed. The line is firm: a civil servant who was just doing their job is not named; a company officer with central responsibilities is named in their official capacity.
- Personal identity numbers (personnummer), direct phone numbers and private addresses are always redacted. The material shown on an article's source pages is partly redacted; originals are made available on request to journalists, since the same material can be pulled from Bolagsverket by anyone.
Verification
Every factual claim in a published article links back to its source. Click the number after a paragraph to jump to the reference list. The company's right of reply is documented: when we haven't received a response, the article says so.
Corrections and updates
We don't make silent edits. Every change after publication is logged in the public changelog (currently maintained in Swedish). The first published version will always be available as a reference.
Technology
The site is built in Astro and rendered as static files for our web host, Hostinger. Interactive elements (the polygon map, the ownership-chain network graph) only load when the reader scrolls to them, so the article is readable immediately even on a slow phone. Maps are drawn with MapLibre GL; the ownership chain with Cytoscape. Printed maps, and some of the maps here, are rendered by our own QGIS-based mapping tool Pärmaps, whose colour palette is also used on the web so that map, print and text stay in step. The same technology underpins gruvkartor.se.
Contact
To send a tip or ask about an investigation: info@arebladet.se. If you'd like an encrypted channel, say so in your first message and we'll come back with details.