The current president of the Nobel Committee led the organization responsible for the historical reconstruction of Utøya Island after the 2011 attack for 12 years. These irregularities must also include his association with a consultancy company for the commemoration and construction of monuments.
By: La Tabla/Data Journalism Platform 11 OCT 2025
A audit report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released in October 2024 uncovered abnormalities in the management of Utøya AS during Jørgen Watne Frydnes’s tenure. These included purchases made with company funds of copies of a book he had published, transactions that lacked formal approval from the board, raising questions about resource usage. At that time, Frydnes was already serving as the president of the Nobel Committee (a position he still holds), which amplified public attention on the report’s findings.
The audit, commissioned by the board of Utøya AS and detailed in a 49-page document, identified potential violations of corporate law, decisions made without proper documentation, and conflicts of interest that compromised the organization’s financial transparency.
PwC documented extraordinary salary payments without adequate justification and transactions executed without minutes or authorizations from the governing body. The lack of internal controls and concentration of decision-making in the executive management created, as per the report, a pattern of poor governance.
Frydnes dismissed the findings and claimed that the decisions were based on operational needs; his defense was conveyed by his lawyer, Berit Reiss-Andersen. The report was not fully disclosed, but its content reignited the debate on accountability in organizations with significant symbolic weight.
List of anomalies and details
– Purchase of copies of the director’s book: PwC indicated that the entity used funds to acquire copies of the book without any record of board authorization; the report did not specify in the public summary how many copies were bought or the exact amount involved, leaving it as a pending verification item.
– Extraordinary salary payments: unusual compensations were identified outside the standard scales without additional contracts or formal approval documentation.
– Transactions without documentation: several operations lacked invoices, contracts, or minutes to justify their purpose and beneficiary.
– Unmanaged conflicts of interest: decisions benefiting people close to management were not subjected to independent evaluation or recusal.
– Omission of control procedures: there were no records of board deliberations and absence of periodic reviews by internal audit.