So CDMCC tells me that IKEA owns a charity that is even bigger than Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I search for it online and find an article on the Economist: IKEA – Flat-pack accounting. Of course it must’ve been in the Econimist, this is CDMCC. He reads movie reviews from the Economist.
Anyway, the article is a very interesting read on how the entire IKEA business is setup and how they move money around to avoid taxation.
It’s sickening actually, that because of different charity foundation laws in different countires, IKEA has found a loophole to do the following:
IKEA says only that this money is used for charitable purposes and “for investing long-term in order to build a reserve for securing the IKEA group, in case of any future capital requirements.” IKEA adds that in the past two years donations have been concentrated on the Lund Institute of Technology in Sweden. The Lund Institute says it has recently received SKr12.5m ($1.7m) a year from Stichting Ikea (which also gave the institute a lump sum of SKr55m in the late 1990s). That is barely a rounding error in the foundation’s assets. Clearly, the world of interior design is being tragically deprived, as the foundation devotes itself to building its own reserves in case IKEA needs capital.