OREANDA-NEWS. February 18, 2010. 'Management of one of the Russian divisions of the company turned a blind eye to the fact that contracting company gave a bribe in order to arrange energy supply of Mega trade centre in St. Petersburg', as Vedomosti newspaper cites IKEA.

This information was collected from an e-mail found on Friday and adressed to IKEA's Director for Real Estate in Russia Stefan Gross, Regional Director, Central and Eastern Europe Per Kaufman and several other top managers. IKEA's representative in Russia Oksana Belaychuk reports that the same day Gross and Kaufman were fired. 'According to corporate rules, when they had learnt about illegal actions of the contractor, they should have taken some steps which were not taken', she says. According to Belacychuk, it is not clear from the letter what exact trade centre is meant.

'Mega Dybenko' and 'Mega Parnas' were constructed in St. Petersburg by Turkey's Renaissance Construction. This company has already built seven Mega centres in different Russian regions and presently is constructing one more in Ufa. 'We do not know anything about corruption in IKEA', Lenenergo (a regional power supplier) press secretary Mikhail Vlasov says. He adds that Lenenergo fulfilled all obligations of powering up all the IKEA's facilities and kept all the terms.
The two IKEA's centres in St. Petersburg were not succesfull with power supply from the very beginning. Opening of 'Mega Parnas' in December 2006 was delayed twice due to energy supply problems. The building which occupies 120,000 sq m was not plugged to the electric supply and worked on diesel generators.

'Mega Dybenko' also experienced some power supply problems: in December 2008, IKEA Mos affiliate structure filed an arbitration claim to Sistemy avtonomnogo snabzheniya OJSC ('Systems of autonomous supply') whose diesel power plants IKEA leased from. Rental fees (US1.6 per day per one kW and US 800 for leasing fuel storages) were higher than market prices, as the claim states (on January 29, the claim entered the Higher arbitration court). IKEA's founder Ingvar Kamprad claimed the energy companies on Eur 135 million of artificially raised electricity and gas tariffs.

Due to 'impredictable character of administrative procedures in a number of regions' IKEA's President Anders Dalvig reported last year that the company freezes up further investments in Russia.