Heavier punishment for SOEs involved in work safety accidents

BEIJING -- China's State assets manager and supervisor will revise the work safety evaluation rules to increase the punishment for State-owned enterprises (SOEs) involved in major work safety accidents, a senior official said Friday.

Laws and regulations on work safety "are the basic requirement for production and the red line which cannot be crossed," said Huang Shuhe, vice chairman of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), the watchdog for China's 113 large state-owned enterprises administered by the central government.

"The SOEs administered by the central government should strictly abide by laws and rules on work safety, and there shouldn't be any compromise," Huang said at a work safety and emergency management meeting, without elaborating on what the heavier punishments might be.

The meeting was held days after a deadly oil pipeline blast in Qingdao city in east China's Shandong province. The blast ripped through residential areas after crude oil leaked from an underground pipeline operated by Sinopec, the country's largest oil refiner and one of the 113 SOEs overseen by SASAC.

As of Monday, the blast had taken 55 lives, and left nine people missing and another 145 hospitalized.

According to Huang, serious work safety accidents this year had significantly damaged the reputations of the 113 SOEs administered by the central government.

He demanded that the management of the 113 SOEs be cool-headed over the challenges of work safety and make great efforts to find and eradicate problems.

He also said Category-I enterprises, which deal with mining, construction, and the production and transportation of dangerous materials, must establish director of work safety positions in their headquarters.

The work safety director should be responsible for assisting enterprise leaders in the overall supervision of work safety management, Huang said.