STOCKHOLM – Successful entrepreneur or sleaze merchant? Sweden’s answer to Hugh Hefner could be seen as a perfect example of the former, but porn magnate Berth Milton is not a popular man at home. Building on a monthly pornographic magazine founded by his father, Milton has in less than 15 years created one of the world’s largest producers of hard-core pornography, Private Media Group. Shares in the company were listed on Nasdaq in 1999 and it had revenues last year of $49 million.

Milton’s firm has no presence in his native Sweden, whose reputation for liberal attitudes to sex has been overtaken by a growing public reluctance to tolerate pornography.

“I’ve tried a few times, but because of Swedish morals, whenever I’m behind something, helping out or investing, it gets smashed to pieces,” Milton said by phone from his headquarters in Barcelona.

In a country where a newly launched feminist party recently won 7 percent of support in an opinion poll, the pressure on politicians and companies to take a stand against the sex industry is intense.

Sweden’s armed forces recently banned staff from booking into hotels offering porn television channels, a rule that will eventually apply to most civil servants, a result of a campaign by the National Organisation for Women’s Shelters in Sweden (ROKS).

“We see a connection between the violence of men towards women and the porn industry. We know that men who abuse women are always big buyers of porn,” said ROKS’ head Ireen von Wachenfeldt.

In another recent example of controversy around pornography, Swedish media group MTG cancelled reality show Porn Star, which was produced by Private, from its Danish mainstream TV3 channel after a media fuss and complaints by some MTG shareholders.

In Denmark, the issue hardly got noticed.

“I don’t think this says so much about the Swedish attitude to sexuality as it does about public debate, which is currently very much focused on morality,” said Katarina Lindahl, head of the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (RFSU).

The RFSU is a leading advocate for sexual openness in Sweden which since the 1930s has helped to secure the right to abortion and contraceptives and to decriminalise homosexuality.

Lindahl said the organisation’s work in promoting sexual education in schools was one of the main reasons for Sweden’s reputation for being open-minded when it comes to sex.

“I don’t think Sweden ever was the “promised land” of porn that it’s sometimes made out to be, but what created this image was that people were open about sex. They didn’t show porn on TV. A couple of nipples was enough,” she said, referring to the nude scenes in Ingmar Bergman’s 1953 movie “Summer with Monika”.

Milton said his name alone caused investors and clients to shy away, such as when Sweden’s prison service found out he was an investor in a private air charter it had used.

“We didn’t want any connection to him,” said Goran Stenbeck, purchasing manager for prison service.

Milton protested that he was not even a board member of the air charter firm snubbed by the prison service and said Sweden had become “hysterical” about porn.

“I don’t get it, it’s like a witch hunt against pornography while at the same time people on reality shows become stars because they have sex on TV,” he told Reuters.

One of Private’s biggest owners is top global fund manager, Fidelity Investments, with a 9.3 percent stake in the company, but it has no large Swedish owners aside from Milton.

Judging from the reaction when a Swedish equity analyst last year issued a “Buy” recommendation for Private’s shares, that situation looks likely to remain unchanged.

“If we Swedes took off the blinkers and looked abroad we’d see that Private is viewed there as a role model for how a company can and should be run in the industry,” Martin Sorqvist of Stockholm-based brokerage Fischer Partners wrote.

He probably wishes he hadn’t — his boss publicly withdrew the analysis, Fischer’s switchboard says Sorqvist doesn’t work there anymore and Sorqvist declined to comment, saying only that he wished to “have a good relationship with my employers”.

Milton said he could understand people’s objections to his business, but that investing in Private would be no less ethical than in any other large corporation.

“Where do you draw the line? You know that top fashion retailers will have stuff that was made by child labour. They don’t want it, and they work really hard to prevent it, but it does happen inevitably,” he said.

“Are you supposed to boycott them completely? At least with us you know that all our staff are of age. They’re all over 18.”