More than 16,000 tonnes of wheat has gone bad after a State-owned enterprise (SOE) left it sitting in a warehouse in Central China's Henan Province for seven years.
The China Grain Reserves Corporation (Sinograin) stored wheat in a warehouse of the Jinshuo Grain and Oil Corporation in Xinye county, starting in June 2010, the China News Service reported Monday.
According to their contract, Sinograin should have paid 50 yuan ($7.14) per ton annually to Jinshuo as a storage fee. However, according to a local court Sinograin stopped paying Jinshuo after September 2010.
According to a grain purchase notice issued by the central government in 2010, Sinograin was paid a grain storage fee of 70 yuan per ton by the authorities that year, which was increased to 86 yuan per ton in 2011.
The Xinye county People's Court ruled that Sinograin owed Jinshuo 1.94 million yuan as of March 31, 2016.
"I didn't expect that an SOE like Sinograin would not pay us on time, Sinograin didn't keep its promise," Zhang Chunqing, Jinshuo manger said, also claiming that the firm hasn't paid the money it was ordered to by the court.
"Sinograin finally took away the wheat, which had gone so bad even pigs won't touch it," a Jinshuo employee told the China News Service.
"The wheat we bought didn't meet our standards. We planned to store it and sell it later to industrial alcohol companies, but Jinshuo refused to let us take away the the wheat in 2014," Sinograin Monday stated on Sina Weibo.
However according to the quality check report conducted by Sinograin on the wheat shortly before it was put into storage, the wheat was of standard quality.
