World Bulletin / News Desk

Declassified files at the National College for Studying the Securitate Archives (CNSAS) have revealed that the Swedish furniture chain Ikea once funded the notorious Romanian Securitate secret police during the Cold War.

The report showed that Ikea agreed to be overcharged for Romanian-made products, a report in the The Guardian stated, with some of these funds going to the Romanian secret police.

Ikea however denied the accusations.

"We have investigated this internally and have found no grounds to believe that we had direct contact with the Securitate in our documents," said Ikea spokeswoman Josephine Thorell to the Dagens Nyheter daily on Friday.

She explained saying that Ikea at the time worked with mediator company Technoforestexport for seven years between 1981 and 1988, which would arrange business in Romania.

During the Cold War era Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu employed some 11,000 agents and hundreds of thousands of informers to work for the Securitate, which was one of the biggest secret services in the Eastern bloc at the time.