Jordförvärvslagens praktiska tillämpning – En studie av Jordbruksverkets praktiska tillämpning av beviljandegrunden särskilda skäl när beslut om förvärvstillstånd fattas för juridiska personer.

Sammanfattning: Agriculture and forestry are important to Swedish society, not only in terms of employment and exports, but also from a historical perspective. Traditionally, agricultural and forestry land has usually been inherited between generations. Strict requirements have thus been set for when and under what circumstances legal persons may acquire such land. The Land Acquisition Act regulates the situation where a legal person wants to acquire land taxed as agricultural units from a natural person. For the property acquisition to be valid, the law imposes a requirement for land acquisition authorization (sw: jord-förvärvstillstånd). One of the ways for granting permission is the “special reasons” ground, which is more difficult to grasp than the other grounds. The purpose of this paper is to present the current legal situation regarding the special grounds, and to describe how the Swedish Board of Agriculture has applied the grounds over the past five years, when they, as the first instance, make decisions on acquisition permits for legal persons. Thus, the initial part of the paper consists of a description of the current legal situation, and then moves on to an account of the decisions. Furthermore, the purpose of the pa-per is to analyze whether the implementing body makes decisions in accordance with the current legal situation. The paper presents that when assessing whether special reasons exist, a balance must be struck between preserving the balance of ownership between natural and legal persons and what is reasonable in the individual case. Public interests must also be considered in the assessment. The government bills for the Land Acquisition Act exemplify different situations when special reasons can be considered to exist but emphasize that the examples are not exhaustive. Acquisition authorization based on special reasons has been examined once by the highest court and in this case, the Supreme Administrative Court de-scribes which situations cannot constitute special reasons. After a compilation of the decisions from the Swedish Board of Agriculture, seven out of twenty-three cases were granted their applications for acquisition permits. Of these seven cases, six applications were granted based on an explicit example from the bills, while one case was granted based on a public interest. The analysis shows that the Swedish Board of Agriculture is restrictive when it comes to granting acquisition permits on special grounds. This interacts with the purpose of the law to preserve the balance of ownership between natural and legal persons. It is also in line with the wording of the granting provision – it gives implementing bodies the possibility and not the obligation to grant acquisition authorizations to legal persons. It can also be noted, based on the material that has been the subject of this review, that the Swedish Board of Agriculture is restrictive in granting permits if the circumstances cannot be qualified under the explicit exemplifications given in the bills. Thus, unless circumstances can be matched with the exemplifications, the greatest possibility for a grant is to justify the application based on a public interest.