The governor of Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province admitted Saturday that the largest coal mining group in the province still owes salaries to its workers, contrary to his denial a week ago that such a situation existed.

"I was wrong. No matter which level of government the wrong report was from, no matter the reason, I was wrong, and I will make corrections," said Lu Hao, governor of Heilongjiang Province, in response to his inaccurate report that all the workers in Heilongjiang Longmay Mining Holding Group Co Ltd were paid properly, the Beijing Times reported Sunday.

He also vowed to seriously handle inaccurate reports on important information.

Lu first responded to reports of his mistake in a conference addressing the development of Longmay Group in Beijing on Saturday, saying the company "still owes its employees wages, has failed to pay taxes and all types of insurance, and many of its staff and workers are living a hard life," according to a report on the Heilongjiang government's official website.

Lu explained that wealth inequality among the company's staff and heavy losses to the company were due to "problems accumulated in history."

"The company should respect reasonable appeals from staff and workers to reduce misunderstandings, and the recurrence of such mistakes will be severely dealt with."

Lu previously said that the 80,000 workers at the mine were "not unpaid in any month nor shortchanged a single cent," reported thepaper.cn.

A large crowd of workers from Longmay Group's Shuangyashan subsidiary allegedly protested following Lu's announcement.

The State-owned Longmay Group has subsidiaries in the cities of Jixi, Hegang, Shuangyashan and Qitaihe in Heilongjiang Province.

The group suffered financial losses after the slide in the price of coal and began management restructuring in 2014 in an attempt to give its subsidiaries more power to become self-operating market entities, the Xinhua News Agency reported in December 2015.


Newspaper headline: Earlier report on SOE mine workers’ pay false: governor