Warren Buffett said on Thursday October 18th that his Berkshire Hathaway Inc has sold his entire stake in PetroChina, whose parent company has been criticized for ties to Sudan.

In an interview on Fox Business Network, Buffett said, "we sold based on price," adding that "it was 100 percent a decision based on valuation."

He also said he probably sold too soon because shares of PetroChina have risen since the sales began.

Berkshire once owned more than 11 percent of the Chinese oil company's publicly floated shares.

The shares were worth $3.31 billion at the end of 2006, well above the $488 million that Berkshire paid for them, according to Berkshire's latest annual report. Berkshire's selling first surfaced in July.

Critics have said PetroChina, through its government-owned parent China National Petroleum Corp, is too closely linked to Sudan. The Sudanese government has been blamed for what the White House has called genocide in the Darfur region.

Shareholders at Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire's annual meeting in May overwhelmingly defeated a proposal calling on Berkshire to divest its PetroChina stake.

Buffett had opposed the proposal, though he said conditions in Darfur were deplorable and that he sympathized with people who wanted to change them. He said selling would not improve conditions in Sudan, and that Berkshire should not divest automatically because it disagrees with a particular activity.