TAIPEI (Bloomberg) -- China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., the Hong Kong-listed unit of China Petrochemical Corp., hasn’t made a bid for Swiss oil producer Addax Petroleum Corp., spokesman Huang Wensheng said on Monday.

The U.K.’s Sunday Times reported on Sunday that Sinopec, as China Petroleum is known, bid 4.8 billion pounds ($7.9 billion) for Geneva-based Addax Petroleum. This exceeded an earlier bid by Korean National Oil Corp., the newspaper said without saying where it got the information.
Sinopec’s Huang said it “isn’t clear” if the company’s state-owned parent is making a bid. He spoke by telephone from Beijing.
Xu Dongmei, the manager of overseas cooperation projects for unlisted China Petrochemical, said she has no knowledge of the bid and her department isn’t in charge of making the offer. Calls to the board secretariat of the parent company, which handles public relations, weren’t answered.
Sinopec fell 0.7 percent to HK$5.84 at 10:22 a.m. in Hong Kong. Shares of Asia’s biggest refiner have declined 20 percent in the past year, compared with an 18 percent drop in the benchmark Hang Seng Index.
China, which relies on imports for about half of its crude- oil needs, is seeking to increase investment in overseas petroleum fields as oil’s plunge of 51 percent from a July record makes it cheaper to acquire overseas energy assets. Addax has operations in West Africa and holds exploration licenses in Iraq’s Kurdistan, which has begun exporting oil.
Addax said on June 9 that preliminary talks were under way with third parties expressing an interest in a “potential transaction” with the company. It didn’t elaborate. Addax said on June 1 it has started crude-oil exports from the Taq Taq license area in the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.
Addax, which is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, has a capitalization of C$6.89 billion ($6.15 billion).