Huawei have an office in Sweden, so my guess is that's the 'team based in Scandinavia' they're talking about.

That said, if you've got a group of ex-Nokians building an OS then it makes sense that you'll probably want to use something like Mer to do it. A lot of the stuff in SailfishOS is open and so they don't really need Jolla in order to roll their own UI and Apps on the top of it.