“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.
