Narrator There is a bookcase in your house. It cost less in two thousand nine than in nineteen seventy-nine. Not adjusted. Plain money. This film is about who paid for that.

Narrator You have knelt on that floor. The hex key. The diagram with no words in it. The one leftover screw you decided not to think about. Whatever else this story turns out to be, it is furniture you have touched with your own hands. That is not a small thing and the film will not pretend it is.

Narrator The company that made it starts with four letters and one piece of paper. Summer, nineteen forty-three. A seventeen-year-old farm boy registers a mail-order company: pens, wallets, picture frames. He builds the name out of his own: Ingvar Kamprad, of the farm Elmtaryd, near the village of Agunnaryd. They have told you about that paper for eighty years, and every word of it is true.

Narrator The same year, in Stockholm, Sweden's security police opened a file on the same seventeen-year-old boy. The title on the cover is one word.

Narrator One of those papers grew into the most familiar company on earth. The other, nobody read for fifty years. This film reads both.

Narrator You already know the machine. The maze. The flat box. The meatballs. Here it is in one minute. Then the film spends the rest on the question nobody asks. Who owns this?

Narrator So, quickly, and then never again. Furniture entered the line in nineteen forty-eight and took over almost at once. The first proper catalogue, nineteen fifty-one, print run two hundred and eighty-five thousand. The first true store, Almhult, October nineteen fifty-eight. From nineteen fifty-six, self-assembly and flat packaging entered the model, and the company began designing furniture backwards from the box. Kungens Kurva, nineteen sixty-five, the largest furniture store in Europe: twenty-eight thousand people on the first day. Switzerland, seventy-three. Germany, seventy-four, soon the biggest market of all. America, nineteen eighty-five, outside Philadelphia, meatballs arriving the same year. The catalogue peaking at two hundred million copies a year in thirty-two languages. That is the story everybody tells, and every word of it is true.

Narrator And that is the flat pack's nativity scene, as the designer Gillis Lundgren told it, half a century after the fact. It is a lovely story, and you have very probably heard it already today. So here is a different sentence. The man who started this company, who is on the front of every telling of it, is somebody most people who love IKEA could not name.

Narrator His name is Ingvar Kamprad. And there is a story about him so good it has been told for eighty years. Here it is, told properly.

Narrator The story goes that he started selling at five. By seven, the story goes, he had discovered wholesale: buy the matches in bulk in Stockholm, sell them box by box around the farms, keep the difference. Then seeds. Then pencils. Whatever the country around Elmtaryd needed. He was born in March, nineteen twenty-six, raised on that farm, dyslexic, in a county where nothing came easy.

Narrator Ten years later he is seventeen and he prints four letters on a government form, sounding them out under his breath, because the letters fight him. Ingvar. Kamprad. Elmtaryd. Agunnaryd. That part of the story is paper. It needs nobody's memory. Almost none of the rest of it is paper.

Narrator Everything I just told you comes from one book. Nineteen ninety-eight, written with him, by a biographer he chose. Not a lie. A single source. The film comes back for that.

Narrator There is a second seventeen-year-old on that farm. He is the reason this cannot be a business story. I will introduce him, and then leave him alone for eight minutes.

Narrator Otto Ullmann. Thirteen years old when a Swedish church rescue mission brought him out of Vienna, in February, nineteen thirty-nine, without his parents. A Jewish boy placed in the Swedish countryside, who came to work on the Kamprad family farm and became Ingvar's close friend. When the mail-order company needed hands, Otto was one of the first people he hired. His mother and father wrote to him from Vienna. More than five hundred letters.

Narrator By the mid nineteen fifties his prices have made him the most hated man in the Swedish furniture trade. And they do something about it.

Narrator The boycott was real and it was total. The National Association of Furniture Dealers pressed producers and retailers alike: no supply, no trade fairs, no seat at any table, until the prices came up. The prices did not come up. So he went looking for a country that would sell to him.

Narrator January, nineteen sixty-one. Ingvar, his father Feodor, purchasing head Ragnar Sterte and designer Bengt Ruda spent four days on a ministry bench in Warsaw before a factory manager named Marian Grabinski walked them into a plant himself. Polish production came in at roughly half the Swedish cost, and Poland became the backbone of the supply machine. He never hid what those years cost him: he said the negotiations ran on vodka, and that he controlled the drinking by drying out three times a year, on a schedule.

Narrator If you know one thing about where IKEA furniture comes from, it is Poland. This is when. Nineteen sixty-one. When a cost will not move, leave the country it lives in.

Narrator A communist state, a planned economy, and a Swedish company just locked out of Sweden. So the cartel that set out to strangle this company is the reason it left, found a supply chain at half the price, and became a global one. Watch him do it again with money.

Narrator There is a document inside this company that employees talk about almost religiously, and almost nobody names it. The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, nineteen seventy-six. It is the best thing he ever wrote.

Narrator The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, nineteen seventy-six. Doctrine in his own voice, still handed to the faithful. Both of those sentences are verbatim. It is a genuinely great text about designing for the many instead of the few, and this film is not going to be clever about it. The same year he wrote it, he left Sweden in protest at Swedish taxes and settled above Lake Geneva. A sermon against waste, filed from Switzerland.

Narrator And through all of it, the man in the story: the old Volvo, the economy seats, the restaurant salt packets in his pocket, the flea-market clothes. The richest poor man on earth. By nineteen ninety-four he is sixty-eight, on every list of the richest men alive that dares to count him, and the story is perfect. Then, in May, in Malmo, an old man dies.

Narrator Nineteen ninety-four. A man dies in Malmo and his papers go to an archive. Archives do not negotiate. Two journalists open the boxes, and one of the names is the most trusted in Sweden.

Narrator The dead man was Per Engdahl. He led Sweden's fascist New Swedish Movement and he had called Hitler Europe's saviour.

Narrator In October, Expressen published what the papers held: Ingvar Kamprad, from nineteen forty-two, sixteen years old. Meetings. Fund-raising. Recruiting members. Contacts with Engdahl running to at least nineteen fifty. The founder of the most familiar company in Sweden had a chapter that had never been printed.

Narrator His answer was a letter, not a press conference. It went to the whole company, reported at the time as some twenty-five thousand employees, and in translation it said: the greatest mistake of my life. He also wrote, to all of them: you have been young yourself, and perhaps something happened during your own youth which you now, a long time afterwards, think was silly. Even the apology is a pitch, and he was the best there has ever been.

Narrator What it admitted was the Engdahl movement: fascist, and Swedish. What it did not admit was the Nazi-youth involvement being reported that same autumn, which he said he could not clearly recall. That phrase has a seventeen-year echo. He also offered a why: a Sudeten German grandmother who admired Hitler, a boy shaped by his own kitchen. That explanation is his. The film hands it to you as his and adjudicates nothing.

Narrator The story settled where he set it down: a youthful mistake, confessed, regretted, contained. It stayed there for sixteen years.

Narrator In August, twenty ten, a journalist named Elisabeth Asbrink sat across a table from him with a recorder running.

Narrator One year later, Asbrink published what Sweden's security police had held all along. A surveillance file, opened in nineteen forty-three, when he was seventeen. The year of the company. The title on the cover: Nazi. Membership number four, zero, one, four, in Svensk Socialistisk Samling: the actual Swedish Nazi party. Not a sympathizer, in the file's account: a recruiter. Wartime censors steamed his letters open, and the file remarks that he did not seem to miss an opportunity to work for the movement. Her access ended at nineteen forty-nine. Nothing is proven after that. And in nineteen fifty he invited Engdahl to his wedding, and wrote that he was proud to belong to the same circle.

Narrator Now the arithmetic. The apology, nineteen ninety-four. The record it should have contained, twenty eleven. Seventeen years. The admiration, on tape, twenty ten. Sixteen years after the greatest mistake of his life.

Narrator And here is everything the record does not say, on screen, for as long as it takes to say it. He was sixteen and seventeen years old: a minor. The organisations were Swedish: he was never a member of the German Nazi party. Sweden was neutral, and joining was legal. And no source, in eighty years of looking, alleges violence by him. This record does not need inflating, and inflating it is the one way to lose it. What it shows is enough: member four, zero, one, four. A recruiter. Watched by his own country's security police. A friend of Engdahl to nineteen fifty. An admirer, on tape, at eighty-four.

Narrator Now come back to the letters. More than five hundred of them, from Vienna: a mother and a father writing to the boy they had sent to safety. In late nineteen forty-four, Otto Ullmann's parents were deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, and murdered there. The letters stopped. Otto had worked beside Ingvar through those exact years. He was at the company from its first days. His children have said he never had an inkling of his friend's politics, and that when the story broke, they were angry. The anger is theirs, and documented, and this film does not perform it for them. It reports it, and leaves the room quiet.

Narrator Sweden answered on the record, and this film quotes rather than judges. Dagens Nyheter, in an editorial: it was his life's biggest mistake, and yet he keeps repeating it, for the rest of his life. And the company, through its spokesman, in twenty eleven: Ingvar has told of the biggest mistake of his life time after time, and apologised to all involved, twenty years ago. Both are on the record. This chapter never resolves. It only documents.

Narrator Everybody can tell you how IKEA makes it cheap. Almost nobody can tell you who gets paid. Buy anything, in any IKEA on earth, and the money goes somewhere very strange. Follow it.

Narrator IKEA is on no stock exchange. There are no shareholders to report to, and no share price to look up.

Narrator The store almost certainly belongs to Ingka Group, which operates most IKEA stores worldwide: about eighty-seven per cent of all IKEA retail sales. Ingka pays for the brand. A franchise fee of three per cent of net sales, to a company called Inter IKEA Systems, in Delft, in the Netherlands. Who owns the store side? A Dutch foundation: Stichting INGKA Foundation, created by Kamprad in nineteen eighty-two. No shareholders. It cannot be bought and it cannot be taken over. And who owns the brand side, the three per cent from every sale on the planet? A foundation in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, called Interogo, founded in nineteen eighty-nine. Nobody owns IKEA. Two foundations own IKEA. Both sentences are true, and he built it that way.

Narrator In two thousand six, The Economist looked at the Dutch side and published a phrase that stuck: on paper, the richest charity in the world. Their arithmetic, attributed and dated: a foundation worth roughly thirty-six billion dollars, whose documented giving ran to about a million euros a year. They called the piece Flat-pack accounting. And the Liechtenstein side was better than quiet. For more than two decades the public did not know Interogo existed at all.

Narrator Hours before the broadcast, the statement went out: the Interogo Foundation exists, it owns Inter IKEA, and he retained some control. SVT put the foundation's funds at about one hundred billion kronor.

Narrator An archive, opened by a death. A documentary, hours from air. A police file, published by a journalist. Every door in this story was opened from the outside. Not the rooms. The doors.

Narrator What that structure is worth in unpaid tax has no adjudicated answer, so here is what can be said and nothing more. In twenty sixteen the Greens group in the European Parliament published an estimate: about one billion euros of tax avoided across Europe over six years, by routing that three per cent royalty, untaxed, through the Netherlands toward Liechtenstein. Their estimate. Their methodology. Attributed, and never adjudicated. In December, twenty seventeen, the European Commission opened a formal state-aid investigation into Inter IKEA's Dutch tax rulings, and widened it in twenty twenty. As this film is written, that case has never closed. Eight and a half years. No verdict. So this film states none. Nobody has been found guilty of anything.

Narrator And the last panel of the legend: nobody owns IKEA, and nobody profits. Half of that is documented. No person owns IKEA; the foundations are real; the family cannot simply sell it. The other half rests on foundation bylaws never published in full. The family holds the governing seats: Mathias Kamprad on the boards of Inter IKEA and of the Interogo Foundation itself; Peter chairing Ikano's supervisory board, Jonas beside him. Forbes once moved Kamprad far down its rich list after his lawyers produced documents saying the family cannot benefit. Bloomberg ranked him eighth in the world the month he died. Two ledgers, never reconciled. The resolution is inside documents nobody outside has read.

Narrator A telling that keeps only the good column is an advertisement. Only the bad one, and it is an execution. Here are both. They do not cancel.

Narrator The good column is made of receipts. A bookcase that got cheaper for thirty years in plain nominal money. A mug called BANG, designed backwards from a price of fifty cents and the mathematics of a pallet. By twenty sixteen the food alone was a one point eight billion dollar business, and the company's own research said nearly a third of visitors came only to eat. Democratic design was not a slogan. Measured at the till, decade over decade, it was true.

Narrator And the second column, each line documented, each line stated once. In twenty twelve, IKEA's own commissioned investigation confirmed that political and criminal prisoners in East Germany had been used in supplier production for IKEA decades earlier, and that company representatives at the time knew of the possibility. Its sustainability chief said: we are deeply sorry that this could happen. In twenty thirteen, the European horse-meat scandal reached the meatballs: horse DNA in a frozen batch, sales pulled across at least thirteen countries. In twenty twenty-one, a French court convicted IKEA France, criminally, for a scheme of illegally collecting personal data on employees, union representatives and customers. The company's fine of a million euros was not appealed and stands. The former chief executive's sentence was reduced on appeal in twenty twenty-three, and one count was quashed and sent back for retrial in twenty twenty-four, still unresolved. In two thousand four, in Jeddah, a store-opening promotion drew a crowd in which three men died.

Narrator And the heaviest paper in the file, which you may already have been told about. In twenty sixteen, after children died under tipping chests of drawers, IKEA and the American consumer-safety agency recalled twenty-nine million MALM and other dressers. By the twenty eighteen re-announcement, the government's own record counted an eighth dead child. The settlements with the families are documented public fact: fifty million dollars, then forty-six million more. Those families are private people. This film gives you the government's documents, exactly as filed, and nothing else.

Narrator The man who wrote that wasting resources is a mortal sin furnished the world's small apartments honestly and cheaply. The same machine, at its worst, had prisoners in its supply chain, detectives in its French offices, and twenty-nine million dressers in a recall notice. Both columns are the company. Neither one is the whole of it.

Narrator He moved home to Smaland in twenty fourteen, after his wife died. On the twenty-seventh of January, twenty eighteen, he died in his sleep, at home, at ninety-one. Bloomberg's headline four days later: the fortune falls to no one. Even his money died the way he lived. Two ledgers, and the true one never published. Fifty years on, the Testament still runs the place. Cut your own costs. Hold the price. It is our duty to expand.

Narrator So finish where you started. On the floor, with the hex key. The furniture was honest. The same shelf for the surgeon and the student, and it got cheaper while nearly everything else on earth got dearer. That record is made of receipts. The history was flat-packed. Shipped light. Assembled by you. Delivered with a diagram and a promise that all the parts were included. Some parts were not included.

Narrator Two documents. One summer. One seventeen-year-old. The first, he showed you for the rest of his life, and every word of it was true. The second was pried loose by a death, a broadcast and a journalist, one door at a time, decades late, none of them opened by him. One paper calls him I. K. E. A. The other calls him member four, zero, one, four. Both names are his. This film's whole job was to lay them on the same table.