On 26 May 2010, the Council on Ethics recommended the exclusion of PetroChina due to the risk of complicity in human rights violations associated with the construction of two oil and gas pipelines in Burma by its parent company, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). In its recommendation, the Council assumed that such infrastructure projects in Burma would entail human rights violations and considered that there is an unacceptable risk of PetroChina being complicit in human rights violations due to the close ties to its parent company, CNPC. Among other things, the Council assessed the companies’ management and corporate structures and concluded that, as concerns the risk of contributing to human rights violations, the companies should be perceived as one single unit insofar as CNPC’s activities in Burma cannot be separated from PetroChina’s operations.
The Ministry of Finance has decided not to follow the Council’s recommendation. The Ministry finds that the nature of PetroChina’s relationship to CNPC is not such that the two companies should be viewed as one.
Please find the recommendation here (pdf).