China’s state-owned supermajor PetroChina is making headlines for the wrong reasons after its senior official was caught in a cheating scandal video that went viral, China Project reported.
Hu Jiyong, president of PetroChina’s EPC unit Huanqiu Project Management, was videoed by a street photographer last Wednesday, interlocking fingers with a young woman, taking a romantic stroll in Chengdu, capital of southern China’s Sichuan province.
As soon as it hit the internet, the video blew up and sparked widespread interest in the pair. Online sleuths identified the man as Hu and the woman as Dǒng Sījǐn, a co-worker of Hu’s at China’s largest state-owned energy company. Anonymous internet users who claimed to know Hu began sharing scoops about his private life, alleging that he had been cheating on his wife for quite some time.
As speculation regarding the couple ramped up, resulting in a barrage of trending hashtags on Weibo that collectively garnered billions of views, CNPC released a statement on Wednesday evening—less than 24 hours after the original video was uploaded—announcing that Hu had been removed from his positions in the company and would face further investigation from its disciplinary committee. According to local media reports, Dǒng has also been dismissed