The Stockholm School of Economics received 5 million kronor in donations from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to new files released by US authorities, more than triple the amount it has previously admitted.

The university had previously admitted to receiving 1.5 million kronor between 2001 and 2014 to fund Barbro’s Best and Brightest, a careers network run by the Swedish-American businesswoman Barbro Ehnbom, and the Female Economist of the Year Award, another Ehnbom initiative.

Stockholm School of Economics alumni include politicians like Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson, government ministers Johan Forssell and Benjamin Dousa and major Swedish business figures like Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski and iZettle CEO Jacob de Geer.

The files published as part of the latest release of documents from the US Justice Department, detail payments of $420,000 between 2002 and 2014, which would amount to a total of 5 million kronor in today’s prices. 

The payments were received as bank cheques, which Ehnbom and other members of the network cashed in, with the money then used to pay the salaries of young women working for the network as well as for running costs such as food and alcohol.

Ehnbom was reportedly close to Epstein, and Stockholm School of Economics said that it cut ties with Ehnbom in 2015 when it became aware of this connection.

Epstein, who had links to some of the world’s top business people and politicians, was convicted in 2008 by a Florida court of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute, although he served only 13 months in prison before being released. 

He was arrested again in July 2019 charged for sex trafficking and died in his jail cell on August 10, 2019, a death that was ruled a suicide. 

The latest release of files by the US Justice Department has also revealed the extent of Epstein’s friendship with Mette-Marit, Crown Princess of Norway, and forced the resignation of Peter Mandelson, a former British Labour Party minister, from the House of Lords.  

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After the Expressen newspaper brought the files to the attention of the university’s leadership, its press chief Hanna Flodmark said that the episode had been “extremely painful”. 

“We believed that the scholarship was a good thing that would play a positive role in gender equality,” she said. “As more and more information about Ehnbom has emerged through the media in the years since 2015, we have been dismayed to realise that there was much beneath the surface that we did not know. We feel extremely saddened that young women have been introduced to a sex offender by someone they trusted and felt confident in.”