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All eyes on overseas State assets
By Sun Shangwu (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-04-27 00:22 The central government is working on specific
rules to increase supervision of State-owned assets held by Chinese enterprises
operating overseas, a senior official said yesterday in Beijing.
Bosses of such enterprises will receive strict punishment for any practices
that go against the rules and endanger their companies' assets, said Li
Rongrong, minister of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration
Commission, the organization that supervises State-owned enterprises (SOEs) on
behalf of the Chinese Government.
Li made the remarks yesterday when talking about the supervision of
State-owned assets and reform of SOEs to members of the Standing Committee of
the National People's Congress (NPC).
All legislators are attending the four-day 15th session of the 10th NPC
Standing Committee, which concludes today.
Li said the move follows the US$540 million loss by the China Aviation Oil
(Singapore) Corp, after it became involved in speculative trading.
"The central government has urged all central SOEs to learn lessons from this
case and take positive and effective measures to strengthen supervision," said
Li.
Official statistics show the number of overseas Chinese enterprises falling
directly under the State Council's umbrella is more than 690, with total assets
of 629.9 billion yuan (US$76.5 billion).
The central government is now investigating how many enterprises are involved
in high-risk business activities, such as derivatives trading, said to Li.
When turning to SOE reform, Li said that more than 1,800 large and
medium-sized State-owned enterprises will face bankruptcy in the next four
years.
These SOEs employ 2.8 million staff and suffered losses of 15 billion yuan
(US$1.8 billion) in 2003 alone, Li added.
However, he said the overall performance of SOEs is improving: SOEs and
companies in which the State is the majority shareholder made combined profits
of 727.96 billion yuan (US$88.5 billion) last year, up 48 per cent from 2003.
Fraudulence in statistics
Jiang Zhenghua, vice-chairman of the NPC Standing Committee, yesterday
reported to lawmakers the results of an investigation into the implementation of
the Statistics Law.
Lawmakers inspected the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Liaoning and
Zhejiang provinces and Chongqing Municipality at the end of last year, said
Jiang, and found a slew of fraudulent activities in the collection and reporting
of statistics.
In Liaoning, statistics departments detected more than 4,700 illegal cases
between 2000 and June 2004, mainly involving the reporting of fake statistical
figures.
Local officials from a district of Chongqing municipality were found to be
changing statistics so as to cheat officials at a higher level.
Jiang urged statistics departments to find effective ways of guaranteeing the
authenticity of figures they report, such as publishing figures on the Internet
to allow wider public scrutiny.
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