Voters in the Finnmark municipal election on 14 September swept into office a cohort of candidates who campaigned on restoring public services and challenging industrial secrecy. Within 48 hours the new health committee had ordered restricted hospital files unlocked; what they found prompted an emergency meeting in the hospital boardroom in Alta and calls for a national probe.
Hospital and environmental sampling records, correspondence and a spreadsheet seized by the committee show what council members call a pattern of reclassification and delayed reporting for cancers and abnormal thyroid hormone tests across three coastal settlements. The files implicate a private chemicals company planning a major listing and a regional health office that handled public messaging.
What the records show
The documents include a seven‑page spreadsheet from the Alta community hospital lab listing 72 cancer diagnoses between 2018 and 2025 in residents living within 25 kilometres of the Lysfjord chemical terminal. An attached memo from 2023 instructs clinicians to code “remote residence anomaly” rather than record cluster location when filing to the national cancer registry, according to the council copy.
Internal minutes obtained by the committee record three meetings between senior officials at the regional health office and executives of Nordic BulkChem — the private company that operates the Lysfjord terminal and has been preparing a NOK 8 billion (about €680m) initial public offering on Oslo markets. Epidemiologist Maurycy M. Jakubowski, who has reviewed the files at the council’s request, said the timing was striking: “The rise in unusual thyroid and lymphatic tumours coincides precisely with two major production increases at the terminal in 2019 and 2022.”
They hid the numbers because they feared the company's flotation would be wrecked.
Aitor Ulloa, new council health committee chair
Residents and doctors react
Local clinicians say they were repeatedly warned to avoid public comment. Kerstin Gunnarsson-Nyberg, a senior nurse at Alta Community Clinic, said staff were told in 2022 not to hold an open meeting after several families raised concerns. “We were left to reassure people without data at hand. That is not how medicine should be practised,” she said.
Newly elected mayor Júlía Valdórs told reporters she has referred the material to the national prosecutor and demanded an immediate safety inspection of Lysfjord. The health ministry confirmed to this newspaper it had instructed a team of independent inspectors to begin on 25 September and that the national cancer registry had been asked to re‑examine submissions from the affected clinics. Sonia Palmieri, who is listed in Nordic BulkChem’s press materials as a communications executive, said the company “has cooperated with regulators for years” and that planned listings are under review internally; she declined to answer whether company executives met regional health officials.
The political consequences were swift: two investment banks that had advised the flotation notified potential backers they would pause work pending the ministry review, market sources said, and analysts suggested the firm’s prospective valuation could fall sharply if environmental liabilities were confirmed. Residents say they want health screening now; Lórenz Njörðs, a 46‑year‑old fisherman from a village at the head of Lysfjord, said, “We voted for change because my neighbour’s child was never told why her tests kept coming back wrong. We deserve to know.”
