Investing.com - Shares in China Petroleum & Chemical Corp (HK:0386) (Sinopec) fell 5% on Friday in Hong Kong after Reuters reported that two high-ranking officials of its trading subsidiary Unipec had been suspended after the company suffered losses on oil trades.
Sinopec’s stock is now down almost 22% from Dec. 3 and hit a one-year low on Friday.
“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 judgement,” an unnamed source told Reuters.
Sinopec released a statement on the same day confirming the suspension of Unipec President Chen Bo and the company’s Communist Party of China representative Zhan Qi “due to work reasons” but did not link the suspension to any wrongdoing. Rather, Sinopec said the losses at Unipec were related to crude oil transactions and were related to drops in the price of oil.
Unipec Vice President Chen Gang is taking over administrative responsibilities.