Provinces block environmental rules - SEPA

SEPA's Pan Yue

Pan Yue, the head of China's State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) complaints that critical environmental regulations are being blocked by provinces and financial institutions, writes the Financial Times.
Last year SEPA got the power to exclude extremely polluting industries from getting loans, but despite making a blacklist, the effect of the new rules is almost zero.

The announcement on the Sepa website said the agency had forwarded an initial list of 38 companies who had seriously transgressed environmental regulations to the banks last July.

Altogether, since the programme’s launch, the names of about 30,000 companies with less serious breaches have been reported to the banking authorities.

“Some were banned from getting more loans and two companies (of the 38) were even asked to give up the loan they received previously,” Sepa said.

But Sepa said its successes were only “partial” and far from the goal the agency had set for itself.

“The reason is that some provinces are not following the green credit plan, and even if they are, it’s only superficial.”

Yet another example that shows that good intention alone are not good enough to trigger off change. SEPA has traditionally very little real power and it is interesting to see whether these public complaints will help.