Financial Transparency Coalition

The Age in Australia has borrowed quite heavily from my blog the other day on IKEA, so I hope they won’t mind if I borrow back from their rather good blog on the same theme. As they say:

The advance guard of the crowd heading for Sunday’s rugby league grand final might have wondered what the traffic jam was about on Homebush Drive heading away from Olympic Park - the queue was to get into the car park for IKEA’s massive headquarters store. This wasn’t an opening special, there was no spring sale, not even...

IKEA is a private company. It does not need to publish an annual financial statement ion the form as a quoted multinational corporation. And it doesn’t. But it has (I think for the first time) published a limited annual report. That’s the good news. The bad news is it does not tell us much. This is the profit and loss account:

A decision of Swedish furniture retailer IKEA to suspend further investment in Russia because of corruption is a sign that business here is still fraught with risks for international investors. While President Dmitry Medvedev has taken a clear position on anti-corruption and introduced legislation to curb official bribery, the reality is that corruption continues on a massive scale in the economy and society. However, IKEA’s response to the corruption challenge — to reduce further investment rather than pull out altogether — suggests that the risks can be managed. International companies and governments have an important role to play in...