The State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) said on Monday it had ordered an agency used to conduct environmental impact assessments to halt operations for three months due to malpractice, today's China Daily reported.

According to Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau, the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Center at Peking University made misrepresentations about construction projects and their environmental impact, did not carry out complete investigations into protection of areas around projects, and conducted no reliable analysis of projects' use of clean energy.

An SEPA spokesperson said the municipal bureau sent the case to the national regulator, which demanded the agency's suspension along with improvements in technology and discipline.

Three small and medium-sized projects in the capital were involved in the case: two real estate projects and one part of a secondary school construction project.

The SEPA is responsible for licensing environmental impact assessment agencies, supervising their operations and punishing them for failings. The agencies are paid by construction projects to conduct assessments and report to environmental protection bureaus so that projects can proceed.

"There are many reasons for malpractice by agencies," an SEPA official yesterday, "Some irresponsible agencies regard their job as a kind of procedure required for the planning and construction of a project, not for the environment."

"Some agencies do not have sufficient technology to carry out the assessments," she said, adding that "it is possible for agencies to charge more to play down environmental problems."

China Daily said a series of cases of malpractice by environmental impact assessment agencies have recently been exposed, and that the SEPA will take strict measures to discipline agencies.

(China Daily October 27, 2005)