Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Ingvar Feodor Kamprad the 86 year old Swedish business magnate and founder of the retail company IKEA, has been profiled by Oliver Truc in an article published in Le Monde titled ‘Ingvar the king and his three son’. Truc states “The story of the Swedish furniture giant, founded in 1943 … definitely qualifies as a saga. It combines successes, setbacks and the carefully maintained mythology around the patriarch, who even though he is still active has taken a step back since he resigned as CEO in 1986. Today his role in the company is mostly advisory, but he still chairs the Kamprad family foundations. As he hands the reigns of the company down to the next generation – his three sons – questions arise on the issue of IKEA’s sustainability, and Kamprad’s legacy. … Getting things wrong, making mistakes is part of Kamprad’s nine commandments. In 70 years, his company has not been spared embarrassing revelations: child labor, secret foundations with billions of euros stashed in tax havens, destruction of primitive or protected forests, forced labor from political prisoners in East Germany, corruption in Russia, Ingvar Kamprad’s Nazi past in the 1940s and 1950s, spying on employees in France. The list is long – and not complete. Some of these mistakes are directly attributable to Kamprad himself, and he has always gotten off the hook by making light of his weaknesses. Kamprad has sometimes been IKEA’s worst enemy, but he was also its essence. Behind the scenes, IKEA’s executives must manage this paradox – using his image wisely, minimizing his presence, and only keeping his brilliance. No one disputes the old man’s business skills or his encyclopedic memory. Equally legendary is his stinginess and the fact that he sometimes acts like a simpleton. “I have enough money to get by, he said, but the fact is that it is not me who has the money, it’s the foundation.”

Inspired by Olivier Truc, Le Monde ow.ly/j4rWr Image source Hasse Karlsson ow.ly/j4rTw

Carey L Biron the American Washington correspondent reporting on development, international governance and US foreign policy has published an article on the IPS News Service titled ‘U.S. Firms Stash Tens of Billions in Tax Havens’. Biron states “The research arm of the U.S. Congress is warning that U.S. corporations’ use of tax havens has risen substantially in recent years, with companies offering massively inflated profit reports from small countries with loose tax regulations. …Further, these numbers appear to be growing. Extrapolation from the new CRS statistics suggests that U.S. corporate profits reported from, for instance, Bermuda grew by five times during the decade leading up to 2008, the last year for which data is available. Perhaps the most striking part of the new findings is simply the brazenness with which U.S. corporations appear to have become accustomed to misreporting their overseas earnings. …Incredibly, notes Citizens for Tax Justice, an advocacy group here in Washington, these countries were found to have accounted for 43 percent of the 940 billion dollars of overseas profits reported by U.S. multinational corporations, despite having made just seven percent of their foreign investments in those same countries. On the other hand, the five countries where U.S. corporations do much of their overseas business (the United Kingdom, Germany, etc) were reported to tax authorities as having accounted for just 14 percent of overseas profits. …Tax-dodging effectively takes food from hungry mouths,” Stephen Hale, advocacy head for Oxfam, said in a statement. The group offers an estimate of 32 trillion dollars currently sitting in tax havens around the world, and notes that taxes on this lump sum could raise nearly 190 billion dollars a year. On the contrary, Oxfam states, “Just 50.2 billion (dollars) a year is estimated to be the level of additional investment needed, combined with other policy measures, to end global hunger.”

Inspired by Carey L. Biron, IPS News ow.ly/hYE3X Image source Twitter ow.ly/hYE37

John Christensen the British economist co-founder of the Tax Justice Network and director of its London-based International Secretariat, plays a leading role in campaigning for tighter regulation and control of tax havens and offshore finance centres. Christensen told Aljazeera: “In many cases it’s the politicians and their cronies and their families and the business people who sponsor the political parties who are using these offshore financial services so they got no personal interest in closing it down. If they wanted to close it down they could do it tomorrow. It’s not a question of rocket science and how difficult to do that, all they have to do is improve information exchange between countries and require disclosure of information about offshore accounts, offshore companies, offshore trusts. The fact of the matter is they don’t want to do it because they themselves are complicit with the process.” An Aljazeera article states “A new report has now revealed that some of the world’s richest people have more than $30 trillion stashed in offshore tax havens. A global elite group of super-rich has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary amount of wealth offshore. Research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network says the value is as much as the gross domestic products of the US and Japan combined. …the world’s super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off possibly as much as $32 trillion from their home countries and hide it abroad. In fact, G20 member countries, both developed and emerging economies, have been pledging to close down tax havens since 2008.”

Inspired by Aljazeera ow.ly/edi7W image source Save India ow.ly/edh2M