In the early 1970s, Kamprad stared to worry about what would happen if he died. He decided long ago that none of his sons would ever control the company. Although all three work as Ikea managers, Kamprad was worried that they either sell the company or they might squabble over control of the company, and thus destroy it.

So Kamprad has created one of the most unusual corporate structures in the world. He transferred 100% of his Ikea equity to a Dutch-based charitable foundation---Stichting Ingka Foundation as an irrevocable gift in 1984. This is a tax-exempt, nonprofit legal entity that in turn owns owner of IKEA. The Stichting Ingka Foundation owns a private Dutch company, Ingka Holding, which in turn is the parent of almost every other IKEA company. Ingka Holding is a private Dutch company. It owns many of the 287 IKEA stores directly, while the remaining stores are owned by franchisees.

Furthermore, separate from this group of companies, another private Dutch company, Inter IKEA system, owns the IKEA trademark and concept. Each IKEA store pays three percent of its sales to this company as a royalty for the use of IKEA’s intellectual property. The royalties paid to Inrer IKEA system are transferred through a chain of similarly named companies and eventually end up being administered by a trust company in Curacao, in island in the Dutch Caribbean, which refuses to name the beneficiaries of the trust. At the end of this chain of transactions, the unnamed beneficiaries have access to the proceeds from the intellectual property royalties. Thus the three percent of sales from each store that would likely otherwise have been taxable income do not end up taxed in the country where IKEA furniture was actually bought and sold.

This practice of a company shifting income by charging itself for the use of its own intellectual property is certainly not limited to IKEA.