Student Work: Ingvar Kamprad and Anthony Allen Shore

 

Ingvar Kamprad – image from Wikipedia

 

Kinga Leung

Ingvar Kamprad

 Ingvar Kamprad was famous because of the Swedish furniture retail company, IKEA, he founded. He died at age 91, at his home in Smaland, Sweden, on January 27, 2018. He left this world behind, after a short illness, surrounded with his family. He was a billionaire. His total net worth $ 58.7 billion, puts him on the eighth place of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index[1].

Ingvar Kamprad was born on March 30, 1926, near the town of Almhult, in southern Sweden. His parents managed the family farm and ran a lodging house. Kamprad started selling matches to his neighbors when he was five. Later, he sold picture frames, pencils, and seeds. In 1943, at age of 17, he founded the IKEA enterprise[2]. The abbreviation, IKEA, comes from the founder’s initials and the first letters of the family’s farms[3] where he grew up.

Kamprad’s wealth was broken up into a structure that was intended to keep his net worth secure, even after his death. Kamprad, of course, had the control over his entire assets because he was the founder of IKEA. However, this structure made sure that no individual can gain control over Kamprad’s net worth after his death. He kept his money in foundations and holding companies, such as $ 48.6B in IKEA, $ 10B in Inter IKEA[4], and $ 0.1B in Public holdings. This resulted in his heirs (three sons) not having direct control over the IKEA firm. However, they did gain a smaller sum of the money from the family-owned Ikano Group, which is a group of finance, real estate, manufacturing, and retail businesses. Its net worth was $ 10 billion in 2016. Many IKEA stores are in the hand of the Stichting Ingka Foundation, whose main purpose is to donate some of the profit for charity and support innovation in design.

Per Heggenes, the chief executive of the IKEA Foundation, has said that Ingvar Kamprad did not care about money. This is the reason why he spread his assets the way he did. IKEA’s profile was, and let’s hope will be in the future, the production of affordable furniture that is easily transportable. Ingvar Kamprad was known for driving an old Volvo, resisting wearing suits, and flying on economy class. The way Kamprad built up his company and lived his life shows that he cared more about people than about money.

 

Sources:

1. Devon Pendleton, What’s Going to Happen to Ikea Founder’s Billions?, Bloomberg Business (Jan. 31, 2018 5:12AM), https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2018-01-31/ikea-fortune-falls-to-no-one-after-billionaire-founder-s-death
2. Niklas Magnusson, Ingvar Kamprad, Ikea’s Swedish Billionaire Founder, Dies at 91, Bloomberg (Jan. 28, 2018 6:39AM), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-28/ingvar-kamprad-ikea-s-swedish-billionaire-founder-has-died
3. Devon Pendleton and Niklas Magnusson, How the Ikea founder’s billions will be broken up, Irish Examiner (Feb. 01, 2018 7:26AM), https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/business/how-the-ikea-founders-billions-will-be-broken-up-825815.html

 

 

[1] It reports the daily ranking of the world’s richest people.

[2] It started out as a small company selling pens, wallets, and nylon stockings. Then from 1948, it started selling furniture. Finally, Ikea opened its first store in Almhult, Sweden, in 1958.

[3] Elmtaryd farm and Agunnaryd village.

[4] Inter Ikea is the global Ikea franchisor which is controlled by Interogo Foundation. The Interogo Foundation controls the company’s trademarks, brand, and concept. The Interogo Foundation’s Supervisory Council consists the Kamprad family members, but they are in minority and they don’t hold shares.

 

Anthony Allen Shore

 

Anthony Allen Shore. Image from https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/lethal-injection/tourniquet-killer-anthony-allen-shore-executed-texas-1992-strangling-n839056

Maria Ameen

Anthony Allen Shore, known to newspapers and the people of Texas as “the Tourniquet Killer,” goes down in history as an American serial killer and child molester, as well as the first person to be executed in the U.S. in 2018. In addition to molesting countless girls, including his two daughters, he sexually assaulted and murdered four female victims between the ages of 9 and 21 with his signature tourniquet between years 1986 and 1995. He is survived by his parents, his sister, and his two daughters.

Born June 25^th, 1962 to military parents Robert and Deanna Shore, the family moved frequently before Shore’s parents divorced. He then accompanied his mother to her home state of California before he eventually migrated to Houston where the murders occurred. Interviews with his family revealed him to be a predator long before his move to Texas. His sister describes him as using her to stalk female classmates when they were children and, when they were teenagers, to lure high school girls into his car. He would drive by high schools into his twenties, and while the sister was convinced he was assaulting and molesting the girls we picked up, no criminal charges were ever brought against him. Later, after he divorced his first wife and received full custody of his two daughters, his sister became convinced that he was sexually molesting them. Though she reported him several times to social services, no investigations were made. Had an investigation occurred at this time, a minimum of three murders might have been prevented. But no charges were brought against Shore until 1998 when the girls were 12 and 13 and admitted to Shore’s sister that they had both been raped. Even then, Shore was put on probation, was allowed contact with his daughters, was permitted to live across the street from a children’s school, and was not arrested when two urine samples return signs of cocaine use. While not common place in Texas, this situation is, unfortunately, not uncommon.

However, during the investigation into the molestation of his daughters, Shore was forced to give a DNA sample, which was run through the system and matched to the murder of a Hispanic female found assaulted and strangled in a Dairy Queen drive-through in 1992. The long overdue investigation led to a full confession and imprisonment in 2004, and Shore’s execution by lethal injection in January 2018.

While there are no public records of property or a will, Shore owned a house and a tow-truck business before his imprisonment in 2004. However, it is unlikely that he retained his property or business, or that his personal possessions remained in police custody during his 14 years on death row. There are also no public records of whether the family collected his body. However, there are interviews of his family, as well as his two ex-wives and his ex-girlfriend, with whom he considered himself married, expressing relief at his execution. It is unlikely from their interviews that any of them had any interest in collecting any real or personal property of Shore, or even his body for funerary services.

Works Cited

Ap, Texas “Tourniquet Killer” Set to Be First Inmate Executed in U.S. This Year CBS News (2018), https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-tourniquet-killer-set-to-be-1st-inmate-executed-in-us-this-year-anthony-shore/ (last visited Feb 7, 2018).

Sarah Fenske, The Killer Next Door Houston Press (2016), http://www.houstonpress.com/news/the-killer-next-door-6575828 (last visited Feb 5, 2018).

State of Texas, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, https://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/death_row/dr_info/shoreanthony.html (last visited Feb 5, 2018).