Buffett Fooling Self on PetroChina's Darfur Ties

International development operations.

Hmmm ... what's CNPC up to outside China?

Wang Yilin, another PetroChina director, is also a deputy general manager at CNPC. So is Zeng Yukang. Gong Huazhang, another director, is CNPC's general accountant.

The secretary of the PetroChina board, Li Huaiqi, has also spent the last nine years as "Director of the International Co-Operation Department (Foreign Affairs Bureau)" of CNPC.

Liu Hongru, one of PetroChina's "independent" non-executive directors, is a 76-year-old veteran of the Chinese Communist apparatus. Over a long career in the service of the state, his roles included vice governor of the People's Bank of China, deputy director of the State Economic Restructuring Committee, chairman of the Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission and even vice-governor of the Agricultural Bank. He did post-graduate research in "economics" at ... the University of Moscow in the late 1950s.

Other PetroChina senior management also simultaneously hold senior posts within CNPC.

Dick Cheney and the U.S. oil industry have less in common than PetroChina and CNPC. And Warren Buffett, who knows how to read a public filing, knows this full well.

Which makes his public statement, that the two are independent, disingenuous at best. This leads me to the second point: What effect, if any, would divestment have?

You can't prove the future. But you can use logic.