lack of tonnage and the increased rates. With the British Ministry of War Transport and the US War Shipping Administration coordinating their policies in the Hogmanay Agreement, Nortraship and its chief negotiator, Erling Dekke Næss, had a hard fight to protect Norwegian interests. Secret fund When Norway was dragged into the war, Norwegian sailors had significantly higher wages than other Allied sailors. The British government feared that would have a negative influence on the other Allied sailors and so pressed for wage reduction. In the summer of 1940, an agreement was signed whereby the wage difference would be placed in a special fund, to be used for the Norwegian war sailors after the war. When the war ended, the fund was some 43 million Norwegian krona A vocal minority, with Leif Vetlesen as its spokesman, argued for the money to be paid directly to the sailors and not distributed as assistance to needy seamen and seamen's widows, as the government and the seamen's organisations proposed. It became a lengthy legal process that the government won in the Supreme Court of Norway in February 1954. That created much bitterness, and the issue was not permanently solved until the Norwegian Parliament, in 1972, decided to pay an ex gratia sum, a total of 155 million NOK. All seamen or their surviving relatives then received 180 kroner per month that had been sailed. Instrumental in solving the protracted case was Rear Admiral Thore Horve, himself a veteran from the war. Internal fighting As Nortraship was a huge organisation, with tens of thousand of people working around the world during five years of war, there were normally internal problems. The main ones were between the offices in New York and London, each led by determined shipowners: Øivind Lorentzen and Ingolf Hysing Olsen. The various intrigues by Hilmar Reksten constituted a special case, as he worked at both offices. Reksten had already got into trouble with Hysing Olsen when Reksten arrived in London in April 1940, as he had wrongly obtained an insurance settlement from one of his ships transferred to his accounts; which was to be handled by Nortraship, according to the requisition. Reksten was indeed a highly-competent shipping man, but after allying himself with various of the Nortraship leaders, he was in the end sidelined and expelled from the organisation. Other problems were created by Arne Sunde, Minister of Provisioning in the Norwegian