The 85-year-old businessman has instructed the IKEA foundation, which has owned the company since 1982, to more than double its charitable spending to close to £100m a year.
Around £40m will go to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, split over three years, with the rest shared between UN agencies such as UNICEF, UNHCR and UNDP, and Save the Children, to which the foundation is already the largest corporate donor.
“We will donate 1bn Kr per year (£95.7m),” Per Heggenes, Mr Kamprad’s press spokesman, told Sweden’s Expressen newspaper. “There’s been a strong will from Ingvar to do more things for more people by setting a more ambitious goal for the foundation.”
The move follows last month’s revelations that Mr Kamprad at the age of 17 had been an active recruiter and a registered member of the Svensk Socialistisk Samling (SSS), the successor to the Swedish Nazi party.
Mr Kamprad’s youthful Far Right sympathies first came to light in 1994, with the posthumous publication of the letters of Per Engdhal, the leader of the Far Right New Swedish movement of the 1950s, which detailed the friendship and financial support he had enjoyed from Mr Kamprad.
But they were revived last month by Swedish journalist Elisabeth Åsbrink, who unearthed a 1944 file opened by the Swedish Secret Police.
The increase in the IKEA Foundation’s spending will also help counter accusations that foundation is designed more for efficient tax management than international aid.
The Economist concluded its 2006 investigation into IKEA’s finances, by stating: “The overall set-up of IKEA minimises tax and disclosure, handsomely rewards the founding Kamprad family and makes IKEA immune to a takeover.”
The foundation, it said, was,“not only the world’s richest foundation, but is at the moment also one of its least generous.”
It estimated that the Stichting Ingka Foundation which owns IKEA was in 2006 worth about $36bn, making it the richest charitable foundation in the world, far ahead of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which was worth $26.9bn in that year.
But at the time, its outgoing grants were both tiny and dedicated to the underwhelming goal, of “innovation in the field of architectural and interior design”.
Mr Kamprad has already reacted to the bad publicity. After the Economist article, he fought a court battle in The Netherlands to change the goal of the Foundation, allowing it to spend money on poor children in the developing world.
The Telegraph
