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Ikea founder to give additional '1 billion to charity

By Attracta Mooney

Ingvar Kamprad, the billionaire founder of Swedish furniture retailer Ikea, has promised to donate more than €1 billion to charity.

He has instructed the Ikea Foundation, which has owned Kamprad’s family business since 1982, to increase its charitable spending substantially, reports say.

According to the Daily Telegraph, press spokesman Per Heggenes told Sweden’s Expressen newspaper the charity will donate one billion Swedish kronor (€109 million) per year.

“There’s been a strong will from Ingvar to do more things for more people by setting a more ambitious goal for the foundation,” he said.

The 85-year-old’s decision comes just weeks after Swedish journalist Elisabeth Åsbrink reported that Kamprad had been an active recruiter and a registered member of the Svensk Socialistisk Samling (SSS), the successor to the Swedish Nazi party, when he was 17.

It’s not the first time Kamprad’s youthful far right sympathies have been made public – in the mid-1990s, letters of late Per Engdhal, leader of the Far Right New Swedish movement of the 1950, were published and revealed Kamprad’s financial support at the time.  

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