Romania's brutal communist-era secret police received covert six-figure payments from Ikea as part of the Swedish group's deals with a local furniture manufacturer in the 1980s, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.

Recently declassified files at the National College for Studying the Securitate Archives (CNSAS) in Bucharest suggest that the furniture firm agreed to be overcharged for products made in Romania. Some of the overpayments were deposited in an account controlled by the Securitate, the secret police agency.

The documents suggest Ikea was complicit in the arrangement. Ikea denies complicity, but has launched an internal investigation into the matter. It says it was unaware of the Securitate's involvement in its commercial operations.

The revelations will nonetheless raise new questions about Ikea's operations during the cold war, when it also used East German political prisoners to build its products. Ikea was one of a small number of western companies that took advantage of the increasing openness for business of several eastern bloc countries during the 1980s. It was particularly attracted to the prodigious timber resources and cheap labour offered by a country such as Romania.

It made a deal with a Romanian state-run timber company, Tehnoforestexport, in 1981 which by the middle of that decade was worth about £10m a year. According to the documents, the Securitate used a special foreign trade company called ICE Dunarea to skim money from the deals.

Opening the archive



The Securitate, which did the dirty work of Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, torturing and killing thousands of political opponents during his 24 years in power, is believed to have made billions of dollars out of state-sanctioned rackets, kickbacks and other commercial-criminal ruses.

The opening of this part of the Securitate archive this year has shed a mottled light for the first time on some of these economic operations. In the Ikea files – given the codename "Scandinavica" – a cache of formerly top-secret notes, memos, bank statements and reports from the Securitate, coupled with copies of agreements between Tehnoforestexport and Ikea detail how the Securitate got involved in the deal.

One note, from May 1986, written by a senior, unnamed Securitate official, says in March 1983, "there were undertaken by cooperation specific intelligence-operational measures to execute some special currency operations. These consisted of the collection of a 1.85% commission, from the sum resulting from the overbilling agreed with the foreign partner."

A second note from the "Ministry of Interior, Department of State Security, Military Unit 0544", dated 27 September 1986 and marked "Top Secret, sole copy", explains in official language that the "Scandinavica currency collection operation" was initiated "with the aim of receiving foreign currency through over-billing the payments made in the contract between ICE Tehnoforestexport with Ikea of Sweden, valued at 97m Swedish crowns (13.6m US dollars)."

The Securitate note added: "Ikea transferred in our transitory account the sum of 163,005.201 Swedish crowns." The note was signed by "Major Eftimie Gelu", a man revealed in previously declassified CNSAS documents to be Constantin Anghelache, who is now the executive chairman of Dinamo Bucharest football club, which was formerly the interior ministry's football team.

When the Guardian asked Anghelache about his Securitate past and the Ikea affair, he refused to comment. Earlier he had told other reporters: "You are getting into technical issues of exterior commerce", adding "Do I do this any more? I'm with the football," in what appeared to be an implicit admission of his Securitate past.

The documents suggest some of the overpayments made by Ikea were to have been paid back later to a bank account in East Berlin, minus interest accrued. "It was established that the sums originating from overbilling be kept at the Romania Bank of Foreign Commerce … and their restitution be made twice a year at the addresses indicated by Ikea, after retaining the due share of the account beneficiary," reads the typewritten May 1986 document, now archived on microfilm.

The 1986 files reveal that it took the Securitate about six months to repay the monies, during which it made $41,283.28 from interest. At one point, according to the May 1986 file, an Ikea executive named as Ingvar Nilson travelled to Romania to try to recoup the money. The files contain no details about any similar operations conducted during the other years of Ikea's involvement in Romania.

Operation Scandinavica was closed in 1988, when Ikea discontinued its dealings with Tehnoforestexport.

Over seven years, its Romanian partner produced a wide selection of products for Ikea, including parts of the Billy range, Albert chairs, Abo tables and Jonas desks. These were shipped to Ikea stores in Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Austria, France, Belgium and Holland, though not Britain.

Ikea denies it knowingly paid money to the Securitate. In a statement, it said it was looking at the Securitate files as part of an investigation into the revelations.

Henrik Elm, their global purchasing manager, told the Guardian: "It was normal at the time and in that part of the world to work with commissions. We only had one business partner, Tehnoforestexport. We worked on a product price plus two commissions structure. One commission was for Tehnoforestexport, to cover operations and technology, and one was for Ikea, for trading purposes and to transfer knowledge and technology such as machinery to the manufacturer."

Ikea's deals with Tehnoforestexport make no mention of third parties or payments to ICE Dunarea, speaking only vaguely of "spare parts" and "service activity". "The prices in the enclosure No 1 to the Addendum No 31 include 0.2% spare parts and/or service activity which will be granted by the sellers on the buyers' specific request," says a written protocol dated 7 February 1986.

Roxana Bratu, an expert in corruption in totalitarian regimes such as Ceausescu's and a researcher at the School of Slavonic & East European Studies of University College London, said: "It seems that there are indeed serious clues of unorthodox arrangements that are described by the Romanian authorities as 'overbilling' and disguised by the Swedish representatives as 'commissions' or 'equipment pay.'"

History of the Securitate



Between its formation in 1947 and its dismantling in 1991, the Securitate produced an unquantifiable number of victims – as well as the political prisoners and disappearances, the torture sessions, forced labour and direct intimidation of potential dissidents are conservatively estimated to have targeted hundreds of thousands of people.

It is not known either exactly how many people were murdered by the Securitate, but unmarked shallow graves and lime pits full of the corpses of people who vanished in the communist years are still being discovered. The agency's funding was very generous, virtually limitless, during the early years of its existence.

But in the 1980s it was given a slightly different task – to get its hands on foreign currency to reduce the foreign debt accumulated by the regime. This enabled officers to start profitable operations, ostensibly for the state, but latterly to enrich themselves and fund ad hoc operations such as smuggling and people trafficking.

Press reports give the estimate of the total accounts held at the time of the 1989 revolution at $4bn in cash in the Romanian Bank of Foreign Trade, not including assets and investments.

Most of the money held in those communist coffers was never accounted for, but many prominent figures from the Securitate rose to dominate Romania's business environment, the military, the police and areas of public policy in the subsequent democracy.

Curiously, although verbally condemned by politicians, no laws were passed to hold the Securitate to account. No members of the Securitate were prosecuted for their crimes, with the recent exception of three ageing former prison chiefs, now destitute pensioners. They were charged with crimes against humanity and will have to pay 25% of their (very low) income to the descendants of their victims if they are convicted.

• This article was amended on 9 October 2014 to correct a reference to three former Securitae having been convicted of crimes against humanity. They have been charged, but proceedings are still ongoing.

