This page answers the question in its own title: factual reports, what we check, how we source it and what you receive. A Lodline factual report compiles verifiable, source-cited facts about a company, individual or transaction from public registers and lawfully accessible documents, without legal opinion, valuation or predicted outcome.
Who this concerns
A factual report is ordered by three kinds of reader. A company about to sign with a counterparty it does not yet know well, and that wants a documented picture of who it is dealing with before the contract goes out. An investor doing an initial screening pass before a transaction, ahead of the fuller due diligence that would follow if the deal proceeds. A board, general counsel or insolvency practitioner who needs a documented, source-traceable record of a company's public footprint before a dispute or a debt-recovery step begins, so that decisions later are made against facts rather than assumptions.
This service sits within corporate and investment screening work at Lodline, and is usually the first document produced before a screening or transaction file is opened, not a substitute for it.
It is not the right product for a reader who wants a legal opinion on liability, a valuation of a business, or disclosure that only a court or enforcement authority can compel. If a matter already involves foreign registers, and either the counterparty, its parent or the relevant assets sit outside Sweden, the same sourcing method applies abroad only to the extent that a comparable public register exists there and is lawfully open to request. A factual report cannot manufacture disclosure that a foreign jurisdiction does not make public.
What the law says
Under Swedish law as it currently stands, information held in public registers, such as a company register, is lawfully available to any requesting party and can be used as sourcing material without special authorisation. Compiling that information into a report does not itself create new personal data and does not require the powers that a covert investigation or a formal disclosure order would need: the report only restates what is already lawfully accessible, organised and cited.
Processing of personal data within the compilation is bound by ordinary data-protection principles: the purpose has to be defined, the scope proportionate to that purpose, and the material limited to what supports the stated question. A factual report is not sworn testimony and does not carry legal privilege the way advice from counsel does. If it is later relied on in a dispute, how much weight it is given will depend on how the forum deciding that dispute treats documentary background of this kind, not on anything the report itself asserts.
How it works in practice
What a factual report checks
A report is built around a defined, bounded set of categories, agreed before work starts:
- registration status and history of the entity, including registered representatives and filed accounts;
- beneficial ownership as recorded in the relevant public register, where disclosure of that kind is required there;
- filed changes in share capital, and any charge or security interest recorded against an asset in a public register;
- publicly recorded dispute or enforcement entries, meaning matters that are already a matter of public record, not privileged court material;
- publicly registered intellectual-property rights relevant to the matter;
- media coverage that meets a sourcing threshold: a named outlet, a dateable publication, a traceable original.
Corporate and beneficial-ownership data
Corporate data is sourced from the relevant companies register and cross-checked against filed accounts where those are also public. Beneficial-ownership disclosure requirements differ by jurisdiction: some registers require it, others do not, and a name not appearing does not mean control does not exist, only that the register in question does not require it to be shown. That distinction is stated explicitly in every report rather than left implicit.
Financial exposure and public filings
Financial exposure is described from what is filed: annual accounts where public, registered charges or pledges against assets, and publicly disclosed enforcement or arrears listings where an authority makes those public. A factual report does not produce a valuation and does not estimate what a company is worth; it states what is filed and where it is filed.
Dispute and enforcement history
Only entries that are already a matter of public record are included: registered enforcement steps, filed insolvency proceedings, matters that have entered a public docket. A dispute that was resolved privately or settled without any public filing will not appear, and its absence from the report is not evidence that no dispute exists.
How sourcing works
Every fact in the report is traced to a named, dateable, retrievable source. Primary sources, meaning the register or filing itself, are used over secondary reporting of that same fact wherever both exist. Where feasible, a fact is checked against a second independent source before it is included as confirmed rather than as reported by a single source. Every source used is logged in an appendix delivered with the report, so any statement in the body can be traced back to where it came from.
What is excluded
The report does not contain a legal opinion on liability, a valuation, or a prediction of how a dispute would be resolved. It does not use covert investigation techniques and does not rely on information obtained outside lawful public access. Where a register is silent on a point, the report states that it is silent; it does not fill the gap with an assumption.
What you receive
The deliverable is a structured written document: an executive summary, findings organised by the categories agreed at the start, a source appendix citing each fact, and a section flagging where public sources were silent, ambiguous or contradictory. The report does not carry a heading claiming legal analysis, because it is not one; what legal weight to give the findings is a separate step, addressed once the report is in hand.
What to verify before ordering
- which jurisdictions the counterparty, or its parent, actually operates in, since register access and beneficial-ownership disclosure differ by country;
- whether the matter already involves ongoing formal proceedings, which would call for a different, formal disclosure route rather than a factual report;
- whether the counterparty sits behind a layered ownership structure that would need tracing across more than one register;
- whether cross-border coverage is actually needed, or whether a single-jurisdiction check answers the question at hand.
Can a factual report support exposure work under top-up tax rules for large groups?
A factual report can compile the public group structure, filed accounts and registered ownership chain that a top-up tax exposure question depends on, but it does not decide how the rules apply to that structure. For how that decision gets made and who makes it, see who decides on top-up tax exposure.
Can a report help with evidence questions in a Swedish IT or SaaS dispute?
It can compile the public and filed documentary trail around a counterparty, such as registered entity status and any publicly recorded dispute history, but it does not assess whether a specific SaaS agreement's evidence provisions have been met. That question is addressed separately in securing evidence under a Swedish SaaS agreement.
Does a factual report include cross-border asset tracing, for example in Israel?
A factual report is the foundational layer: registered ownership and filed public data in the jurisdictions covered by the agreed scope. Cross-border asset tracing into a jurisdiction such as Israel is a separate, deeper exercise built on different sourcing and different local access rules; see asset tracing and recovery in Israel for what that involves.
The numbers
Turnaround is not quoted as a fixed number of working days, because it depends on the number of jurisdictions covered, the volume of filings that need to be pulled and reviewed, and whether foreign-language registry material needs translation before it can be checked. A single-jurisdiction report on a company with a straightforward filing history moves faster than one covering a layered ownership chain across several registers.
Report length is not set to a template page count either. It follows from how much public material actually exists for the entity in question: a company with a long filing history and several registered charges produces a longer source appendix than one with a short public record. Scope, and therefore the resources a given report requires, is driven by the number of named parties, the number of jurisdictions in scope, and whether cross-border tracing beyond company-register data is included.
Where it usually goes wrong
The most common misuse is treating the report as if it established liability: it states what is on the public record, not who is at fault. A close second is reading a clean report as proof of a clean counterparty, when the more accurate reading is that nothing turned up in the registers actually checked, which is not the same statement if the counterparty's home jurisdiction does not require the disclosure in question to be public in the first place.
A report scoped to one jurisdiction is sometimes later presented internally as if it were a full cross-border check, when the counterparty's actual structure runs through entities in several countries that were never in scope. And a factual report is occasionally used as the sole basis for a commercial decision, when its purpose is to narrow what still needs independent verification before signing, not to replace that verification.
What to do next
Reading this page tells you what a factual report contains, how it is sourced and what is excluded from it. Whether that scope is the right one for a specific counterparty, or whether it should be paired with a narrower question such as a minority-shareholder position, depends on the actual structure involved, and that is where self-directed reading stops being useful on its own.
Where the matter concerns a minority shareholder dispute rather than counterparty screening generally, the minority-protection assessment route uses the same sourcing standard against a narrower question. For everything else, once the jurisdictions and entities that need covering are clear, the next step is an initial assessment call, where the specific facts in question, rather than the general product description on this page, are what get discussed.