Sweden takes great pride in furniture and household goods megastore Ikea. When Jordan opened its first Ikea outlet, the Swedish Embassy in Amman published a statement on its website congratulating the country. The embassy then posted a blatant Ikea ad on its Facebook page, asking, “Did you know that Ikea has more than 300 stores in 38 countries?”

Last year the Swedish Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, touted the opening of first Ikea store in Africa. It’s not often an embassy congratulates a host country for the opening of a store, but really, what could be more Swedish than Ikea?

Few multinational corporations have managed to align themselves as neatly with a particular national identity as Ikea. Even fewer have done so with such spectacular good will. The Swedish company offers affordable furniture for the home, sold in efficient stores drenched in yellow and blue — the colors of the Swedish flag — with restaurants selling the company’s signature Swedish meatballs. The government sees pushing Ikea abroad as a soft power for Sweden, piggy-backing on the company’s success as well as unashamed promotion of the supposed Swedish values of economy, self-sufficiency and family-friendliness.

It is a great story. Unfortunately, it is based on a lie.

Ikea’s association with Swedishness and Swedish values is so ironic that one would be hard pressed to know where to begin. One obvious place to start would be to note that the Swedish government is using taxpayer money to give free advertising to a corporation that left Sweden to avoid paying taxes. Ikea contributes next to nothing to Sweden in the form of corporate tax, all while making billions off of its Swedish image. In fact, the company has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid giving anything back to the national budgets of their host nations.

Ikea’s corporate structure is complicated, but the key point is that Ikea is a Netherlands-based “charity.” For many years, the vast majority of its outlets have been controlled by the Dutch company Ingka Holding, which in turn is owned by the not-for-profit Stichting Ingka Foundation, which was created in 1982 by the founder of Ikea, Ingvar Kamprad, for the purpose of ”furthering the advancement of architecture and interior design.” The Stichting Ingka Foundation is often listed as the wealthiest charitable foundation in the world, with assets in excess of $35 billion. As a result, Ikea pays a minuscule 3.5 percent nonprofit tax rate, far lower than its for-profit counterparts. In addition, recent revelations from LuxLeaks, an investigative project by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, show the company has made deals with the government of Luxembourg in order to pay as little tax as possible to anyone, anywhere.