A pimp who helped run a brothel as part of a major sex trafficking operation has been jailed for nearly three years.

Csaba Safian, 33, was part of a gang that brought 53 young women from a poor part of Hungary to work as prostitutes in the U.K, including in a brothel in Eastbourne.

He was jailed yesterday alongside Sandor Mohacsi, 35, after both pleaded guilty on Friday to conspiring to traffic women into the UK for sexual exploitation, between March 2011 and October 2012.

Five other members of the gang, who also used rooms in the University of Sussex’s Falmer campus as a brothel, were jailed in January after a trial.

Yesterday Hove Crown Court heard how the women worked as prostitutes in Hungary before being recruited to work in England and advertised on website adultwork.com.

Safian, of no fixed address, put his name to the tenancy of a property in Marine Parade, Eastbourne, used as a brothel.

A Hungarian woman said she travelled with Safian to Eastbourne to work in the brothel having agreed to see 10 clients per day at the rate of £100 per day. But on her first day she had sex with more men. Amy Packham, prosecuting, said the woman complained to Safian but he responded that she was “a newbie, and fresh meat, and things would quieten down.”

Ms Packham said the girl was not physically forced to stay in the brothel, but could not afford to fly home and was spoken to in a way that made it clear she should stay, and often chaperoned outside. The gang moved the brothel to Woolwich in November 2011 after police visited the Eastbourne address. Mohacsi, 35, helped drive the girls between hotels and airports, the court heard.

Mitigating, Safian’s lawyer Richard McConaghy suggested his client had been “used” to put his name on documents and was low in the gang’s hierarchy.

Sentencing both men to two years and eight months’ jail, Judge Richard Hayward said the women were “willing to come to the U.K. thinking they would better their lives.”