Ikea funds went to Romanian secret police in communist era
Source: theguardian.com
Secret police files reveal six-figure payments to Ceausescu’s henchmen, as retailer denies knowingly paying Securitate
Romania’s brutal communist-era secret police received covert six-figure payments from Ikea as part of the Swedish group’s deals with a local furniture manufacturer in the 1980s, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.
Recently declassified files at the National College for Studying the Securitate Archives (CNSAS) in Bucharest suggest that the furniture firm agreed to be overcharged for products made in Romania. Some of the overpayments were deposited in an account controlled by the Securitate, the secret police agency.
The documents suggest Ikea was complicit in the arrangement. Ikea denies complicity, but has launched an internal investigation into the matter. It says it was unaware of the Securitate’s involvement in its commercial operations.
The revelations will nonetheless raise new questions about Ikea’s operations during the cold war, when it also used East German political prisoners to build its products. Ikea was one of a small number of western companies that took advantage of the increasing openness for business of several eastern bloc countries during the 1980s. It was particularly attracted to the prodigious timber resources and cheap labour offered by a country such as Romania.
It made a deal with a Romanian state-run timber company, Tehnoforestexport, in 1981 which by the middle of that decade was worth about £10m a year. According to the documents, the Securitate used a special foreign trade company called ICE Dunarea to skim money from the deals.
Opening the archive
The Securitate, which did the dirty work of Romania’s dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, torturing and killing thousands of political opponents during his 24 years in power, is believed to have made billions of dollars out of state-sanctioned rackets, kickbacks and other commercial-criminal ruses.
The opening of this part of the Securitate archive this year has shed a mottled light for the first time on some of these economic operations. In the Ikea files – given the codename "Scandinavica" – a cache of formerly top-secret notes, memos, bank statements and reports from the Securitate, coupled with copies of agreements between Tehnoforestexport and Ikea detail how the Securitate got involved in the deal.
One note, from May 1986, written by a senior, unnamed Securitate official, says in March 1983, "there were undertaken by cooperation specific intelligence-operational measures to execute some special currency operations. These consisted of the collection of a 1.85% commission, from the sum resulting from the overbilling agreed with the foreign partner."
A second note from the "Ministry of Interior, Department of State Security, Military Unit 0544", dated 27 September 1986 and marked "Top Secret, sole copy", explains in official language that the "Scandinavica currency collection operation" was initiated "with the aim of receiving foreign currency through over-billing the payments made in the contract between ICE Tehnoforestexport with Ikea of Sweden, valued at 97m Swedish crowns (13.6m US dollars)."
The Securitate note added: "Ikea transferred in our transitory account the sum of 163,005.201 Swedish crowns." The note was signed by "Major Eftimie Gelu", a man revealed in previously declassified CNSAS documents to be Constantin Anghelache, who is now the executive chairman of Dinamo Bucharest football club, which was formerly the interior ministry’s football team.
When the Guardian asked Anghelache about his Securitate past and the Ikea affair, he refused to comment. Earlier he had told other reporters: "You are getting into technical issues of exterior commerce", adding "Do I do this any more? I’m with the football," in what appeared to be an implicit admission of his Securitate past.
The documents suggest some of the overpayments made by Ikea were to have been paid back later to a bank account in East Berlin, minus interest accrued. "It was established that the sums originating from overbilling be kept at the Romania Bank of Foreign Commerce … and their restitution be made twice a year at the addresses indicated by Ikea, after retaining the due share of the account beneficiary," reads the typewritten May 1986 document, now archived on microfilm.
The 1986 files reveal that it took the Securitate about six months to repay the monies, during which it made $41,283.28 from interest. At one point, according to the May 1986 file, an Ikea executive named as Ingvar Nilson travelled to Romania to try to recoup the money. The files contain no details about any similar operations conducted during the other years of Ikea’s involvement in Romania.
Operation Scandinavica was closed in 1988, when Ikea discontinued its dealings with Tehnoforestexport.
Over seven years, its Romanian partner produced a wide selection of products for Ikea, including parts of the Billy range, Albert chairs, Abo tables and Jonas desks. These were shipped to Ikea stores in Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Austria, France, Belgium and Holland, though not Britain.
Ikea denies it knowingly paid money to the Securitate. In a statement, it said it was looking at the Securitate files as part of an investigation into the revelations.
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Read the full article at: theguardian.com
Ikea used forced prison labour to make furniture
2012 - IKEA has expressed regret that it benefited from the use of forced prison labour by some of its suppliers in communist East Germany more than two decades ago.
The Swedish furniture giant released a report showing that East German prisoners, among them many political dissidents, were involved in the manufacture of goods that were supplied to IKEA 25 to 30 years ago.
The report concluded that IKEA managers were aware of the possibility that prisoners would be used in the manufacture of its products and took some measures to prevent this, but they were insufficient.
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