BANGKOK — The Myanmar military controls an extensive business empire that enables it to avoid accountability and conduct operations with impunity against ethnic groups, contributing to widespread human rights abuses, according to a United Nations report released Monday.

A United Nations fact-finding mission urged foreign businesses and governments to sever ties with more than 140 companies owned or controlled by the military, which has carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing, murder and rape of Rohingya Muslims.

“The Myanmar armed forces are enabled in a very enhanced way to act outside of civilian control and therefore perpetuate their impunity in their involvement in gross human rights violations,” Marzuki Darusman, the chairman of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar and a former attorney general of Indonesia, said in an interview.

The military’s businesses operate largely out of the public eye and have close ties to state-owned enterprises and large private firms known in Myanmar as crony companies. Together, the armed forces, the state-owned enterprises and the crony companies account for a huge share of the country’s economy.