(Bloomberg) -- Svenska Cellulosa AB’s Chief Executive Officer Ulf Larsson defended the firm against claims from short sellers, including that his company had overstated its forest assets. 

Viceroy Research and Ningi Research published separate reports on Thursday, saying they are short the Swedish paper and forestry firm and causing its stock to slump as much as 9%. The shares later pared some of those losses, and are up 2.1% on Friday after the company’s earnings report. 

Viceroy’s report alleged SCA had “vastly overstated” the volume of its forest assets as well as “aggressively” over-harvested its inventory. Separately, Ningi said the company’s financials “cannot be relied upon.”

“For me it’s totally unserious to be honest,” Larsson said in an interview on Friday. “The standing volume we have on SCA’s land is absolutely in line with statistics from the Swedish National Forest inventory. We are 100% sure of what we have in our forests.” 

The company, which is Europe’s largest private forest owner, harvests “less than 70% of available annual growth,” he said.

Short sellers bet against a stock in anticipation that the share price will decline. US-based Viceroy has recently shorted other Swedish stocks, including struggling landlord SBB, formally known as Samhallsbyggnadsbolaget i Norden AB, and industrial software maker Hexagon AB, one of the nation’s biggest companies. It has been short the shares of call-verification software company Truecaller AB. 

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Ningi Research included a link to Viceroy’s note on SCA in a post on X on Thursday but emphasized that it “just happened that we all saw what’s happening at SCA.”

(Adds background on other Swedish stocks Viceroy has shorted from sixth paragraph)

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