Office of the Historian

CFM Files

United States Delegation Journal

September 19, 1946, 10 a.m.

USDel (PC) (Journal) 46

The Commission agreed that in order to facilitate its work it would supplement its present schedule of five morning meetings per week, which would permit only 12 more meetings before the deadline of October 5, with 11 additional meetings. These would be held on Wednesday [Page 485] mornings, Sundays, and three times a week at night. The suggestion of Mr. Thorp (U.S.) that the evening meetings might be devoted to questions of a technical nature, such as those raised by Annexes 5 and 6, met with no objections.

Mr. Gregory (U.K.) spoke in support of Annex B [D] (Petroleum) of the Rumanian Treaty.43 He outlined the present difficult conditions for the operation of United Nations oil companes and explained that the main purposes of the Annex were the following: (1) The Rumanian Government should restore and replace destroyed and damaged property of UN” nationals operating in the oil business in Rumania with the least possible delay. (2) If it was unable to do this, the Rumanian Government should make available foreign exchange to the extent necessary to import the equipment and materials necessary to effect restoration. (3) The Rumanian Government should repeal the Mining Law of 1942, passed under Nazi duress, and restore the Mining Law of 1937 until it had reviewed the situation and had passed a new law. Mr. Gregory also said that paragraphs 4, 5 and 6 provided for certain logical consequences of the requirement that the Mining Law of 1942 be revoked. The U.N. Delegation would be willing to withdraw paragraph 7, which required compensation for certain expenses incurred by UN companies in connection with deliveries to the Axis Powers during the war, if the Commission thought that these charges should not be laid on the Rumanian Government. Paragraph 8 was necessary in order to permit the UN companies to employ certain senior, essential officials who, under existing legislation, could not be employed.

  1. The British proposal here under consideration was somewhat different from that contained in the draft treaty. For text of this proposal, see C.P. (Plen) Doc. 29, Report of the Commission on the Draft Peace Treaty with Rumania, vol. iv, p. 434.↩