Who owns the genealogy companies? Part Seven

Today I consider Genline.com, this is the second of the bigger online genealogy businesses located outside of the United States. It has 18,224,911 images consisting of about 36.1 million pages of Swedish Church records. Genline is located in the Globen area of metropolitan Stockholm, Sweden. Unless you have a direct interest in Swedish ancestors, it is unlikely that you have ever even heard of Genline. Quoting from their website,

In 1993 a project was begun in the town of Duved in the Swedish county of Jämtland. Its purpose was to look at the possibilities of digitalizing Sweden's historical church records and make them available to the general public via the most up to date information technology, and hence the birth of our company Genline AB in 1995.
During the 50’s and 60’s The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were in Sweden to film church books that are kept at The Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints left one set of microfilms with The Swedish National Archives. Genline has bought a copy of the microfilms from The Swedish National Archives in order to produce our Swedish Church Records archive. The microfilms contain information from 1500-1860. Some information from 1860-1900 is from Statistics Sweden (SCB).
In our service development, Genline has used the expertise of various large Swedish corporations within those fields in which we work. 1997 and 1998 saw the addition of highly trained colleagues to Genline's payroll.
From that point on, development, systemization, and programming have all been done by Genline staff.

 The Genline website is operated by Genline Holding AB. The "AB" stands for Aktiebolag or a stock company which can be either publicly traded or private. Genline Holding AB is a privately held company. Quoting from the Corporate Information website,

In Sweden, privately-held AB's must have capital of at least SEK 100,000 upon incorporation. AB's are also required to allocate at least 10% of the profits for reserves per year until reserves are at least 20% of the start-up capital. Publicly-traded AB's in Sweden must have capital of at least SEK 500,000. There must be at least three board members for Swedish AB's. An Annual General Meeting is required. AB's are registered with the Swedish Patent and Registration Office (Patent- och Registreringsverket or PRV). The Swedish automobile and aircraft manufacturer SAAB is actually an acronym -- Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget. Aktiebolaget is sometimes used instead of Aktiebolag, since the definite article is appended to the end of the word in Swedish (Aktiebolaget means THE stock company whereas Aktiebolag means just Stock Company).

 The officers and directors are listed as:
Sten Rundin

Chairman of the Board

Mikko Ollinen

Chief Executive Officer

Bo Carlsson

Director

Per Tengblad

Director

Lena Gummesson

Director

Address

Hallvagen 14
Johanneshov, 121 62
Sweden
+46-8-6003310 (Phone)
+46-8-6003320 (Fax)

 So, essentially the Swedish Archives and Genline are and have benefited from the free work done by the LDS Church microfilmers.