Unipec has suspended two leading officials following losses at the trading arm of Chinese state oil company Sinopec, news wires report.
Unipec president Chen Bo and senior Communist Party representative Zhan Qi have both been suspended for “work related reasons”, Bloomberg and Reuters reported.
Ling Yiqun, a vice president at Sinopec, will take over the duties of both men, Bloomberg said.
Chen Bo, who founded Unipec’s LNG trading desk, was an advocate of boosting China’s crude oil imports from the US to help diversify the county’s supply.
While Unipec is a major charterer of tankers, the reports did not make any direct connections between the actions and the company’s shipping activity.
“The government inspectors were looking into the company’s operations for the past few years ... one of the problems they found was the severe trading losses in the second half of this year because of wrong market judgment,” one unidentified source told Reuters.
Li Li, an analyst with industry consultant ICIS China, told Bloomberg: "The market is closely watching for any details of the loss, including its size and how big an impact it may have on the overall operations of Unipec and Sinopec.
“So far, the confirmed information is very limited, but it also seems that the risk is controllable.”
