China said yesterday that it "attaches great importance to the development of China-Venezuela relations" after a US subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned oil giant Sinopec sued its Venezuelan counterpart.

The lawsuit, filed in a US court, accuses the Venezuelan state-owned oil and natural gas company PDVSA of failing to fulfill a payment of more than $43 million for steel reinforcement bars.

This incomplete payment, Sinopec US alleges, has caused the company to suffer "tens of millions of dollars in damages."

The filing further claims that Bariven, the PDVSA subsidiary to which Sinopec sold the steel rebar, was used as a "sham" to deliberately deprive Sinopec of means to procure its due payment.

The legal action is a "common commercial dispute," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said during a regular press briefing, adding that "there's no need to make overinterpretations of this."

"I want to stress that China attaches great importance to the development of China-Venezuela relations. We are willing to follow the principle of equality and mutually beneficial cooperation with Venezuela in all areas," Geng said.

Sinopec spokesman Lu Dapeng told AFP that the Chinese oil firm "took legal means to protect the rights and interests of our company. ...There's no other deeper interpretations".

PDVSA has not publicly commented on the matter.

China, Venezuela's biggest creditor, expressed confidence last month that Caracas can "properly handle" its debt crisis after two ratings agencies declared the South American country in partial default.

Venezuela is buried under an estimated $150 billion mountain of foreign debt, with experts saying it owes around $20-$30 billion to China.

Geng said following the default ratings that Chinese-Venezuelan "cooperation in various fields are all proceeding normally."

PDVSA defaulted on its own debt in mid-November, a low for a company that was once among the world's top five oil firms and a pillar of the Venezuelan economy.

Sinopec, the listed unit of state-owned China Petrochemical Corp, is the world's biggest oil refiner. In the last quarter, it recorded a 12.77 percent climb in net profit year-on-year.