About - Porto

Our Mission

Porto was created to simplify the complex task of identifying beneficial owners in Norwegian companies. Under Norwegian law, companies must identify "Reelle Rettighetshavere" - individuals or entities with significant ownership or voting control.

The Challenge

Determining beneficial ownership isn't always straightforward. Corporate structures can include:

Circular ownership - where Company A owns Company B, which owns Company C, which owns Company A
Different share classes - where some shares carry more voting power than others
Multi-layer ownership chains - where ownership passes through many corporate layers
Family groups - where related individuals' ownership should be aggregated

Our Solution

Porto uses advanced matrix algebra to solve these complex ownership structures. By modeling ownership as a system of linear equations, we can accurately calculate effective ownership percentages even in circular structures.

The Algorithm

Our analysis follows these steps:

Graph Discovery - Starting from the target company, we discover all companies and shareholders in the ownership chain
Matrix Construction - We build an inter-company ownership matrix and a person-to-company matrix
Fixed-Point Solution - We compute the matrix inverse using Gaussian elimination to solve for effective ownership
Normalization - If circular ownership creates "self-ownership", percentages are normalized
Family Grouping - We aggregate ownership for shareholders in explicitly defined family groups

Norwegian Regulations

The concept of "Reelle Rettighetshavere" (Beneficial Owners) is defined in Norwegian law. The threshold is:

25% or more ownership stake in the company, OR
25% or more voting rights in the company

Both direct and indirect ownership/voting rights count toward this threshold. Porto calculates both separately, as different share classes may have different voting multipliers.

Open Source