IKEA, the Swedish furniture retail giant, has launched an internal investigation into allegations that it was involved in running hard-currency payments to a company controlled by Romania's brutal Communist-era secret police...The claims...allege that in the 1980s IKEA ran an "overbilling" operation that channelled cash to a firm run by the Securitate, responsible at the time for torture, assassinations and the suppression of opposition for the quasi-Stalinist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu...IKEA says that its arrangements in Romania in the 1980s were entirely normal for that era, and says that it has yet to find evidence that it did business in breach of its own code of conduct. But the company is not able to deny the alleged arrangement outright..."We take all matters of this kind very seriously," [Henrik Elm, IKEA's Global Purchase Manager] tells bne. "We are trying to put the pieces together to get a better picture of how the business was running. The documents we have inside IKEA don't cover all the details that far back in time, we are trying to find out more details..." [says Elm] [Also refers to Dunarea, Tehnoforestexport.]