WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SADDAM HUSSEIN’S YACHT?
★★★
THE DIRECTORS AT THE STRUGGLING DANISH HELSINGOR VAERFT SHIPYARD COULD HARDLY BELIEVE THEIR EYES WHEN THE ORDER FROM THE IRAQI AUTHORITIES CAME THROUGH.
Just two weeks earlier, the managing director of the shipyard had handed a brochure for his training ships to the Iraqi embassy in Copenhagen. It was written in Arabic and the diplomatic staff had promised to forward it to Baghdad. The order, signed by Iraq’s Ministry of Defence, came back with unprecedented speed: “We want to buy such ship,” it read.
“But it would be naive to think that you could just come and get a ship contract,” Helsingor Vaerft managing director Esmann Olesen would later write in his memoirs. “It took a whole year and many trips to Iraq and also from Baghdad to Elsinore before we could put our signatures on the new contract” for the training ship.
Nevertheless, the relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime in the late 1970s kept the shipyard, based in the port town of Elsinore in eastern Denmark, afloat, and led to five further orders from the Middle Eastern country.
It was not without controversy, though. The next order was for three roll-on/roll-off ferries, but the Iraqi chief of staff was also demanding warships from the Danish yard. “That was completely out of the question for political reasons,” remembers Olesen. “The three Ro-Ro ships we built gave rise to a great deal
