Officials lose jobs for failure of oversight

Company was told to stop polluting; it secretly resumed production instead

Three officials responsible for a county in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region have been removed from their posts after a company that violated environmental protection rules resumed production without authorization.

Qian Kexiao, Party secretary of Yongning county in Ningxia’s capital, Yinchuan, and Li Runjun, head of the county government, have been held accountable for the situation along with Xu Qing, vice-mayor of Yinchuan, who oversees environmental protection in the city.

Qian is also a member of the Standing Committee of the Yinchuan Committee of the Communist Party of China, according to a statement from Ningxia authorities on Saturday.

The decision was made in a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Ningxia Committee of the Communist Party of China presided over by Shi Taifeng, Ningxia’s Party secretary. The committee also established a team to investigate the three officials.

In 2016, environmental inspectors from the central government asked Ningxia Tairui Pharmaceutical Co in Yongning to rectify its environmental violations after finding that an “undesirable odor” emitted by the factory had affected nearby residents’ lives.

Tairui was ordered to suspend production after the inspectors revisited Ningxia in June and found it had failed to rectify the problem.

The company released gas with an offensive odor at least once a day. The inspection team received 28 public reports on the first day after arriving in Yinchuan in June, with 17 of the complaints related to Tairui.

Tairui said on June 22 that it would suspend production and relocate its factory.

Local inspectors in Ningxia found during a recent visit to the company, however, that Tairui had resumed production without authorization.

“This is a case that’s vile in nature and with especially flagrant circumstances,” the meeting of the regional CPC Standing Committee said. The committee will launch an investigation into Tairui and its executives and severely punish its environmental violations, it said.

Local authorities had shut down and sealed all the facilities that Tairui used for its clandestine production, as of 7 am on Saturday.

The committee also vowed to comb through major companies in Ningxia for environmental violations and to ensure that any found are “completely rectified”. Regular environmental inspections and law enforcement will also be enhanced, it said.

Tairui, in Yinchuan Wangyuan Industrial Park, claims to be China’s largest production and export base for veterinary antibiotics and a major global producer. Established in 2000, it has about 3,000 employees and boasts total assets of 6 billion yuan ($872 million).