The report, by auditors Ernst and Young, concluded that German prisoners had supplied parts to the Swedish company for nearly 30 years. “We deeply regret that this could happen,” said Jeanette Skjelmose, Ikea’s sustainability manager. “At the time, we did not yet have the well-organised control system we have today and clearly did not do enough to prevent this type of production method.” The company had claimed previously that it had no knowledge of the use of forced labour…Hans Klare, a former inmate at Waldheim who worked on sofa production at the factory, described conditions there as “slave labour”…The…report also concluded that the company may have known about the use of prisoners…[T]he vice-president of an association representing victims of the communist regime in East Germany, dismissed the Ernst and Young report as “unscientific”. “Ikea as the guilty party is itself conducting the investigation rather than leaving it to unbiased sources…we strongly doubt the validity of the results,” he said.